Helen Pearson

A good profile of a scientist goes beyond the science itself — and that’s why Helen Pearson’s ears perked up when she learned the personal story of Joe Thornton, a University of Oregon evolutionary biologist whose first career was as a Greenpeace activist, fighting the release of toxic industrial chemicals. Pearson wanted to know what makes Thornton tick, how his activism has influenced his scientific work, and what drives the intensity that his colleagues cite as one of his most distinguishing attributes. [Raising the Dead appeared in Nature on March 21, 2012.] Here, Pearson tells the story behind her story:

What made you think of profiling Joe Thornton?

I had occasionally read news stories about Joe’s work, but what really happened is one of our manuscript editors at Nature enthused about him to me, not only about his work but also told me about his career in environmental activism. Now obviously his scientific work is completely fascinating, but I think having the interesting life before the science is really what made me think he’d be good for a profile, because when I approach a profile, I generally look for something beyond the science, like an interesting personality or a personal story that will give it that extra lift and interest for the reader.

I’d also interviewed him because he had a paper coming out earlier this year, which was showing the evolution of a complex molecular machine. I interviewed him briefly for that and I wrote a blog post about it, so I was able to ask him a few questions then and figure out whether this was really going to work. He was completely upfront about this idea that his work refuted ideas put forward by intelligent design proponents. For me, that added another dimension to the story, which also made it more appealing.

What questions did you ask in order to determine whether he would make a good profile subject?

We mainly spoke about his work now, but I asked him a little bit about his previous work. I said that I understood that this was basically his second career, and he told me a little bit about that. It wasn’t an enormously long interview, but it was just enough to provide me with a few facts. Then I went away and thought about it. It was a quick interview. He spoke fast — he really went in at the deep end, actually, and afterwards, I emailed him to ask what he thought about being the subject of a longer profile, and he agreed to it.

How did you go about your reporting? Did you interview Thornton before talking with others about him, or the opposite?

I did almost all my other interviews for the story before meeting Joe. I think I interviewed about seven other colleagues — Ph.D. supervisors and other colleagues, and people who he worked with at Greenpeace before he moved into science.

It’s sometimes difficult to get sources to speak frankly about the subject of a profile. For this story, how did you approach your conversations with Thornton’s present and past colleagues so that you had the best chance of getting a full picture?

People were surprisingly open — I didn’t have a huge challenge as you might have with some more controversial figures. I wasn’t actually looking for or expecting any criticism, really — that can be more challenging to get. But I did want more than, “Oh yeah, he does really great science.” So I asked things like, “How did you meet Joe? What was it like when you worked together? What do you think about what he’s doing now?”

How much time did you spend preparing before sitting down with Thornton?

A lot. As I wrote in the story, all the people I’d spoken to who knew Thornton said he was very intense, and he’d come across as quite intense in that initial interview, so I was a bit intimidated that the whole day was going to be at this level of very intense and complex science. So I prepared a lot so that I was reasonably comfortable with all the material and the papers, so I wouldn’t sound like an idiot. I spent quite a long time on his website, which very helpfully had a list of his publications and also lots of the news stories which had been written about him. I pretty much started with the earliest ones and worked my way up, so that I had a very clear sense in my own mind of what his career trajectory was like. From that I generated a long list of questions that I wanted to ask him. And actually when I met him, he was not nearly as intense as I had expected. He was very thoughtful, and obviously very bright, but he wasn’t intense in an intimidating or alienating way. He just thought deeply about things — and he had a good sense of humor.

How did you prepare Thornton for being the subject of a profile?

When I suggested the profile in my initial e-mail, I briefly outlined in a couple of sentences what the story was going to be about — his work and his earlier career — so he knew it wasn’t going to be pure science. It was important that he was going to open up about his earlier career and be able to reflect on how his environmental activist time had influenced his science today, because otherwise it wasn’t really going to work. So I mentioned that in my first approach to him, and then I sent him a short list of questions before we met so that he knew that I was going to be exploring those things with him. I think that was a good thing to do because I was a bit concerned he wouldn’t really want to talk about it — that he’d only want to talk with me about hard-core science. But actually, because I had sent those questions and made it clear that I wanted a bit more than that, when I met him he’d clearly thought about these influences on his life and how one career influenced the second one.

How much time did you spend talking with him?

We met for breakfast at about 8 o’clock. About an hour later, at the end of breakfast, I think he’d had about three bites of food and we were only reaching the part where he was leaving Greenpeace. I tend to ask a lot of questions, and he had very thoughtful answers as well. I knew a lot of it was not going to make it into the story, but it really gave me a sense of where he was coming from.

Then I’d asked to spend a day with him and his lab, and luckily, he had a lab meeting that day, so I sat in on his lab meeting, which was good — hardly any of it went into the story, really, but it was good to see him interacting with his lab members, and to see him in that “normal” environment.

After the lab meeting, we talked in his office for another 2 to 3 hours, by which point we’d talked logically through his career, and I had asked him every question I could think of. We were both kind of exhausted.

Then he helped me set up interviews with two of his postdocs, which was really good for background and helped me get a few details I used in the story — like one of his postdocs showed me a computer simulation they were doing on their latest work, and I put a little detail of that in the story.

What were some of the key questions you wanted answered?

I really wanted to understand how he had become interested in environmental activism to the point where he wrote this controversial book about it, and how his interests had changed to go into very complex evolutionary biology, because those don’t obviously lead from one to another. I asked him several times, in various ways, how the time at Greenpeace had influenced and shaped his career in science.

Another thing is that in activism, he was fighting for a cause, and now he is doing molecular evolution, but nevertheless appears to have found another cause to fight [for] — against intelligent design — so I wanted to know whether there is some part of him that likes to be fighting against something.

Also (and I worked quite hard at this), I wanted to know whether he led a very green lifestyle. I had this idea that having been an activist at Greenpeace, he was going to be extraordinarily environmentally aware, and I’d read somewhere that he’d built a very environmentally friendly house. Those questions can be a bit difficult to broach because you’re straying outside of your usual science territory, so I kind of tried to extract that from people he knew, as well as asking him directly.

How did you structure your reporting? Did you ask him to map out key career developments chronologically, or did you organize your questions thematically?

I had already worked out that I wanted to talk chronologically through his life — I find that the easiest. I had already sketched out a timeline of his career for myself, and on the basis of that I worked out the questions I wanted to ask. Then when I was speaking with him, I just started at the beginning — parents, where he grew up, influences — so I understood how he got from growing up to environmental activism, and then how he got from there to science.

For his scientific career, he has got such a string of high-profile papers that I was able to just go from one Science or Nature paper to the next one, because I could see already that those were the highlights I would be writing about in the story. After I’d done that, then I came back to more reflective questions, like how his earlier career had influenced his later one.

Your story begins with an episode that occurs while you’re interviewing Thornton over breakfast, when he gets a call from his lab freezer alerting him that the power has gone out, threatening some of the proteins he has stored inside. You also come back to that call from the freezer at the end of the story. I’m wondering how all of that unfolded, from his getting that call to your deciding to begin and end your story with that call? Did you immediately recognize the freezer malfunction’s storytelling value? How much work was it to figure out what the scientific significance of it was? And how did that final moment in the story come about, when you and Thornton listen to the “tinny voicemail message” from earlier in the day? Did you ask to listen to the message so that it could be part of your story, or did the moment arise naturally?

To me, the brilliant thing about doing on the ground reporting is those unexpected, unscripted moments that turn out to be fantastic fodder for your story. When his phone rang, and then he said that it was his freezer, I could instantly see that this could be a good moment in the story. He said to me: My kids think it’s very amusing that my freezer calls me. And I said: So do I! I was turning it over in my mind during the day, and then later I asked his postdoc to show me the -80C freezer and to pull a drawer open — I asked her what was in some of the vials. I knew this would work in some form in the story. When I went back to his office, I can’t quite remember if he spontaneously played me the voicemail on his phone. I think I must have mentioned by that point that the freezer would be in the story, and he seemed game. Later, when I wrote my story outline, I knew I wanted to open with the freezer calling.

Did you record that full day of interaction with Thornton? And if so, did you transcribe all your notes?

I recorded the entire day, yes. I transcribed most of the interview with Thornton, and I highlighted the best parts in the transcript as I went along. It took ages! I didn’t transcribe the two hour lab meeting though, or the interview with his post-docs, because I knew they would probably not be a big part of the story. I listened back to any parts of those interviews that were important. And I wrote most of the story before I transcribed the interview, so it served more to check quotes and make sure I hadn’t missed anything important.

Can you tell me about the writing process? How did you start?

I find when I’m on a reporting trip, I want to write the story almost immediately because I’m quite fired up and all the detail is really fresh in my mind. And I was away from home, so I had the freedom to do that. So the evening after we met, I sketched the outline. The next day, I had really bad jet lag because I had flown from the UK to the west coast of the U.S., so I woke up incredibly early in the morning, and I just started writing it. Then I did it in bits and pieces as I was traveling up to the AAAS meeting [in Vancouver, just after having spent the day with Thornton]. I finished it on the way back home, on the plane from Vancouver to the UK. I was really excited about the story, and I knew what I wanted to write -– the writing part is the bit I enjoy the most, more than the reporting.

How much work did it take to digest your research and interview notes and assemble the story?

Sometimes, of course, it can be completely overwhelming working out how to extract a story from a huge pile of notes and interviews. But in this case, the structure was very straightforward — working chronologically through Joe’s life – so it didn’t take too much to figure out how to tell it. And because it was all so fresh in my mind, I didn’t really stop to consult my notes too much: I just wrote it. Then, later, I transcribed the interview and carefully read through my notes to make sure I had got things correct and had included the key points. I generally find it really helps to write stories when the trip is fresh in your mind — it actually saves time. If you wait too long, you have to remind yourself of all your notes and reporting.

I should of course say that my excellent editor at Nature, Tim Appenzeller, really helped improve and polish the story.

Any lessons that the experience of doing this profile should impart?

The lesson to me is that your biggest hurdle is identifying the right person to profile. If you find somebody who has a fascinating personal story and they do outstanding science, that’s going to be a good mix for a profile.

A glimpse behind the scenes:

• Pitch letter
• Planned interview questions
• Interview notes
• Outline
• Draft comparison

Welcome back for another installment of Ask TON. (Wondering what Ask TON is? See here for background information and our introductory post. Click on “Ask TON” above to see previous installments.)

Today’s question:

A recent NASW post quotes a Slate editor as saying, “We hate quotations at Slate. We almost never use quotes. They don’t do anything. They waste the readers’ time. Only use quotes when you can’t say it better yourself.” Wow! What do other writers and editors think about using quotes? And what do they think about quotes as readers themselves? [editors’  note: The NASW post noted that the Slate editor also said, "I’m against fact-checking because I think it encourages error. The items I’ve made mistakes in are when I’ve been fact-checked."]

We asked several writers and editors to share their thoughts. Here’s what they say:

Slate editor Daniel Engber:

As an editor at Slate, I’m professionally obligated to share this sentiment, at least in part. But I’d share it anyway — quotes can be a particular blight in science columns.

There are some situations where I would certainly endorse the use of quotes. In afeature, it can be important to let the characters speak for themselves. Not only can their language help delineate their personalities, but the presentation of dialogue makes a long piece easier to read. For shorter pieces– reported essays, straight news, opinion, etc.– I would say quotes are useful when a source happens to deliver information in a particularly colorful or clear way, in which case you might want to borrow the phrase with proper attribution. I also like quotes taken from a primary text, where the original formulation happens to be particularly telling in terms of its form and content.

In other contexts, quotes can be a problem. My least favorite is when a writer gives an authoritative-sounding quote from someone obscure. This goes double in science journalism: Don’t tell the reader something, then quote Dr. So-and-So from the University of Blah-Blah to back it up. If you’re relying on a random “Dr.” from some “University” to add credibility to your reporting or argument– i.e., if your reporting or argument don’t seem plausible on their own terms– then you’re already in bad trouble. (Also: Why should I trust Dr. So-and-So? There are plenty of quacks around who love talking to the press, and lots of universities that hire fools and lunatics.) The best way to secure a reader’s trust is through a clear and straightforward accounting of the facts: Make it clear, in the way that you write and what you have to say, that you’ve done your research and talked to the right people for the story. Don’t hide behind someone else’s agreements or affirmations.

If it’s a bad idea to use quotes as a crutch — or a hedge against inadequate reporting — then it’s even worse to use them as filler material, larding up a column with rephrasings of basic information. As an editor and a reader, it makes me wonder if the author had nothing more to say for himself or herself.

In the quote (!) that yielded this question for TON, Jacob Weisberg was expressing an official view that goes back to Slate’s founding by Michael Kinsley in 1996. Things have changed a bit over the years, so these days you’ll find some standard-issue quotes in the magazine from time to time. But there’s still a “classic Slate format,” in the science section and elsewhere, that eschews the kind of quote-mongering typical of newspapers. When a science writer sends me a draft with a lot of quotes in it, I get the impression that he or she hasn’t spent much time reading the magazine. And that’s a bad sign…

Freelance science writer Helen Fields:

When I read that post, I thought, “Wow, Slate hates my two favorite things: fact checkers and quotes.” I love quotes. I’m very good at saying things myself. But the people I interview have unique viewpoints that come through in their particular word choices and ways of saying things.

I once quoted a penguin expert on the topic of finding the dark smear of penguin colonies on satellite photographs of Antarctica: “The poo just sort of stands out at you.” Sure, I could have paraphrased that, but it’s funnier that the scientist says it, and also that he’s British and says “poo” instead of “poop.” And the “you” reaches out and engages the reader.

The quote accomplishes things that I, myself, couldn’t have done. Or didn’t want to. I don’t want to be the only character in my stories. I’m not the authority; my sources are, and I think their voices belong in the story.

Nature Medicine news editor Elie Dolgin:

To quote the early 20th Century American humorist Robert Benchley, “The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.” Benchley may have been joking that people often sound like fools, but, for the most part, they just sound like real people. Quotes are a great tool for giving a sense of a source’s personality. They provide emphasis to details, evoke images that stick in the reader’s mind and provide a conversational humanity to a story. They also provide a level of transparency, demonstrating that the reporter has done his or her due diligence by talking to, at a minimum, the number of quoted sources (or paraphrased ones if ideas are at least attributed to named sources).However, quotes are often dispatched in a lazy fashion from writers who string together batches of statements from the mouths of their sources and pass that off without a cohesive narrative or thesis. Quotes, which necessarily come with lengthy affiliations, also slow flow at the expense of readability. As a result, non-quoted pieces can sometimes provide a more informative and entertaining read where the writer’s voice takes center stage. Still, with those kinds of pieces, you sacrifice the humanity of the people involved. Plus, the reader has to trust that the writer has done the proper reporting and fact-checking to provide the authoritarian voice they bring to a non-quoted source — something that is increasingly difficult to gauge as the line blurs between blogging and journalism. Clearly, they’re a double edged sword. But please don’t quote me on any this!

Scientific American associate editor David Biello:

When it comes to science, nothing can enliven the dull detail of research methods like a quirky quote from the scientists themselves. To work without quotes is to discard a very useful tool, one that can humanize what can be a very abstract field of inquiry, or simply add clarity or wit. It’s like saying I love movies but only those without dialogue.

That said, some writers can over-rely on quotes (guilty!) It’s as if we want to say: hey, I talked to four different scientists about this one piece of research and, by golly, I’m going to quote all of them. So there! That’s not good. Quotes should be used judiciously, and only when they add something to the story. Quotes should punctuate an idea rather than explain it outright (there are exceptions to every rule). If brevity is the soul of wit, to paraphrase is often to make wittier and therefore more compelling and easier to understand. After all, to quote another editor I’ve worked with: “a quote can be a wonderful thing, but it comes at a price…. Verbiage.” (Plus it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what else was said in that ellipsis, no?)

Of course, Slate is a special case. It’s metier is the blog and the blog is essentially one long (sometimes rambling) quote from the writer. It can confuse things to start throwing other’s words into that flow. That said, some of the best bloggers whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with or reading (you know who you are), know exactly when a provocative quote can work wonders. And a news story without quotes is likely to be as dull dull dull as, well, the incipient bits of first drafts of history.

Quotes are a window into the thinking and personalities of the people involved in the story you’re trying to tell as a journalist. Abandoning quotes is abandoning the attempt to give them a voice in their own story. And what purpose does that serve?

What are your thoughts on this issue? Leave your answer in the comment section below.

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(Photo at top: The “Library” by Quinn Dombrowski, via Flickr)

In our new series “Natural Habitat,” we invite science writers to share their working spaces — offices, spare bedrooms, coffee shops, hammocks — and the accoutrements that help them do their best work. (If you’d like to nominate your office to be featured at Natural Habitat, let us know.)

In this first episode of Natural Habitat, we present the office of Brooklyn-based freelancer Cassandra Willyard, who writes for many excellent publications and blogs at the always-riveting  The Last Word on Nothing. Cassie tells us that she went a little bonkers and took more than 100 photos of her office; she whittled it down to a smaller number for us, but you can find more photos and details about her office here.

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

The three cosmologists who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for the 1998 discovery of the accelerating universe were only a few of the dozens of scientists, working on two competing teams, who contributed to the discovery. In a show of team-spirited solidarity, those fortunate enough to be recognized by the Nobel committee invited their colleagues — some of whom were bitterly disappointed to have been overlooked — to join them in Stockholm, Sweden, for a week of Nobel festivities. In a story that brings fresh perspective to a famously fierce rivalry, Science staff writer Yudhijit Bhattacharjee used the events of those seven days in Stockholm as a storytelling frame through which he recounted team members’ personal and professional journeys leading up to the groundbreaking discovery and in the years since. [A Week in Stockholm was published in Science on April 6, 2012.]

Here, Bhattacharjee tells the story behind his story:

How did you come up with the idea for this unusual story?

I started thinking of the story when I was at the American Astronomical Society meeting in January 2012. I was talking to Nick Suntzeff [the Texas A&M University astronomer who co-founded one of the teams that discovered the accelerating universe, but who was not among the Nobelists] for a different story. He was telling me what it was like to be in Stockholm, and how he had all of these powerful emotions that he was wrestling with. I could tell that he was disappointed at not having won the Nobel itself, yet he was very proud. He seemed to be getting it out of his system by telling me and other people. So I thought if I could talk to a number of researchers who were there, then I might be able to tell the story about this rivalry between the teams, and the personal disappointments, through a recounting of those seven days — because it seems natural those feelings would come up while everyone was there.

At the outset, how familiar were you with these teams, the High-z Supernova Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project, and with their rivalry?

The scientific story was pretty well known and I’d covered it, so I was familiar with the accelerating universe. I’ve also written a profile of Adam Riess [one of the Nobel Prize winners, from the High-z team] in 2008. I remember that I asked him what it felt like to be on the verge of getting the Nobel Prize while still having a whole career ahead of him. I’d gotten a glimpse of those personal rivalries when I wrote that profile.

And I’ve read a considerable part of [Harvard University astrophysicist] Robert Kirshner’s book, The Extravagant Universe [which detailed the High-z team's work; Kirshner was Riess’s doctoral adviser]. It was only when I’d started writing this piece that I discovered that a writer named Richard Panek had written a book called The 4% Universe, which included a full-blown account of these two teams and their rivalries. I had not read that book, and when I found out about it I quickly stopped searching the Internet and went back to writing the story.

Why?

I didn’t want to start to feel inadequate.

Was it difficult getting the sources to participate?

When I had my first conversation with Suntzeff, I said, “Do you think other people will be as candid as you have been?” He said, “Well, try them.” Once I started approaching them, everyone quickly got what I was trying to do, so that was helpful.

As you did not attend the ceremonies, how did you so vividly reconstruct Nobel Week, including details of setting and dialogue?

It took a lot of reporting. When I thought of the story I envisioned it as a narrative of those seven days, so I was looking to ask people, “What happened at this event?” or “What happened leading up to that event…and then what happened next? Do you remember what you ate? What somebody said that stood out? How did you guys go? Did you take a bus, or did you take a car?” I’d just prompt them with information that I had, and that immediately would clue in the source to the level of granularity that I was looking for, and they would enthusiastically start remembering things. Then, information from one source would be used to jog the memory of the next source.

I was just lucky to be talking to scientists who were themselves pretty good storytellers — and because the event was such a once-in-a-lifetime event for them, their memory of it was very strong. As it was pretty recent, it was fresh on their minds.

Can you give an example of how you acquired certain information, like the detail about the portrait hanging in the cloakroom of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science?

I was asking about the scene, what it was like to go to the reception, and one of the scientists remembered a giant portrait of the 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe hanging on the wall in the cloakroom. I was trying to capture the epic nature of the ceremonies, so it seemed like a good detail to use, and it also led to my thinking how different the modern scientific enterprise is compared to centuries past.

What other techniques worked for you?

I was particularly lucky to be able to talk to people who weren’t part of the event. For example, I spoke with [High-z team member] Peter Garnavich’s wife, Lara Arielle Phillips, who was very knowledgeable about the rivalry between the two teams but who really was an outsider to the teams. She had a very good recollection of things that happened.

For the dialogue, I had to ask individual sources to tell me what they said at particular events, and whatever they told me is what I put in the story. I used words like “recalled” to make it clear it wasn’t live conversation I was eavesdropping on.

Why did you decide to structure the story as you did, braiding together the narratives of the Nobel Week events and the teams’ long rivalry?

It just seemed the natural device. When the idea for the story came to me, I knew right away that readers would find it appealing to “attend” this big party through the story, and that would become a device for pulling readers through the narrative… not just of those seven days but of the 15 years of science that had gone before it. The history of the discovery is known — books have been written about it — so that was, by itself, not a new story. But I knew that the Nobel had given it a twist and a freshness that allowed the retelling of the story through a different lens.

People want to be taken on a journey, taken to another world, another place, and to experience a sequence of events that will make an impression. Everyone knows about the Nobel Prize, and a lot of our readers know about the accelerating universe. But most of our readers have never been to Stockholm, and they’ve never won a Nobel Prize. They do know there’s a lot of pomp and ceremony, so that seemed like that natural thing to leverage to tell the story.

How did you decide how you would structure the story?

Once I thought of breaking out the story into sections as if they were diary entries, that helped me to write one section after another without worrying about the overall structure, which can be terrifying when you’re writing a long piece and you don’t know where you’ll end up or whether you’ll go off track. So that framework came to me because I visualized the layout.

I also insisted that the layout include a picture of every team member, partly because I wanted 50 people to save a copy of the magazine, but also because I felt that the story was a tribute to the teams and if we committed the same “mistake” the Nobel committee had made by picking out some and talking about their story and leaving out the rest, it would go against the spirit of the piece.

What were the greatest challenges you encountered in writing the story, and how did you deal with them?

What I found most challenging was that in most stories, we write about one or two people because that lends itself to narrative. As soon as you write about a group of people, things get diffuse and you can’t hold the reader’s attention same way as if you describe one person. So I had to balance among multiple voices and still convey a single theme. That’s where the device of the events of the seven days became helpful.

It must have been difficult to report two narrative timelines simultaneously. How did you handle that?

Both teams started working on the science in the 80s, so they had been competing for about 10 to 15 years before the discovery was made in 1998. And then the jockeying for credit went on for many years after that. It was impossible to pick out the defining moments when there are so many. When I would start to ask people about something that happened 12 or 15 years ago, they would start to unleash a torrent of information. I would sometimes be hopelessly lost because I knew that I’d have to write a book to do justice to that. I’d say “No, no, no, this is a very short project so I need to get a broad impression.” But I knew I needed a granular impression of these seven days. It was hard to toggle between the big-picture reporting for that earlier timeline and the detailed view that I needed of the seven days. I was worried about the writing of it — whether I would be able to pull it off without it being too confusing to readers who had to go back and forth. There were several problems to be solved in the writing which I was nervous about.

What were those problems?

It was really the structural problem of juxtaposing these two timelines. I was worried that maybe what happened during the week couldn’t be directly related to the scientific milestones that came on the way to the discovery, and I knew that I’d need some seamless transitions to be able to go from champagne at a reception to the origins of the project. So I was worried that I’d make it too complex and yank readers back and forth from Stockholm, to Chile, to Berkeley. Ultimately I wanted it to be very elegant, and wanted readers at all times present in Stockholm. I especially struggled with the second-to-last section, at the colloquium, which was really the grand finale of the rivalry.

What was especially challenging about that section?

The colloquium is all on video, so I was able to just listen to every talk and then interview the people who spoke to find out what they implied when they said certain things. When I saw that some speakers had narrated anecdotes from the history in that colloquium, I thought it would be great to report them in real time. But I struggled with that because that would have been a real switch of the timeline. So I gave up on that because it was important to keep readers mentally in Stockholm. I decided I had to just choose one or two things from the colloquium from a long list of anecdotes that were described by one speaker after the other. It might have not been the best literary solution, but it worked for my purposes.

How did you end up choosing the anecdotes that you used from the colloquium?

I was looking for some sort of resolution. I wanted the story to go from point A to point B, so you come away with a different view of the world, slightly transformed. The movement in this case was a coming to terms between the two teams, and also for the members who made significant contributions but who did not win the Nobel.

The anecdote that jumped out was the funny one that Peter Nugent told about driving down this Chilean mountain in a Beetle and having an accident, and then Bryan Schmidt, who was on the other team, hurrying out to pull him out of the car and help dust him off. That anecdote got the best reaction, if you watch the whole video. It was just the one thing that implied a reconciliation — the fact that the science was bigger than the personal ego. It also showed that the younger crowd within these two teams was on friendly terms with each other.

The other anecdotes that were more contentious, I left out. There were some mean things that were also said that I filtered out because ultimately everyone that I spoke to said that they came away with a good feeling.

Looking back, is there anything you would handle differently?

I think that I would have reported even more. For example, I got a letter from Bob Kirshner’s daughter saying that when she learned that her father hadn’t won, she wasn’t angry, but she was worried about how he was feeling. In my story I just reported based on my conversations with Kirshner, who said his daughter was upset. Obviously that was secondhand reporting — I should have found out from the daughter exactly what had happened.

There were some other fuzzy spots, like exactly how the fire occurred behind the curtain when the High-z team was having lunch at the restaurant. I would add more depth in reporting for the ring of truth. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things whether a pile of t-shirts burned or just one, but it would have helped me visualize the situation with the fire in more concrete terms, and that visualization gets reflected in the way you write and your writing becomes truthful. To the reader, it might seem like it doesn’t matter, but put all that texture together and it creates the emotional response for a story like this.

Also, I don’t want to admit it, but I don’t think I reported the Supernova Cosmology group’s side as deeply as I did the High-z team. The Supernova Cosmology team had a more hierarchical organization and the rivalries within that team seemed better managed, or didn’t come to the surface. There’s more to that story than I was able to get.

Is there anything people wouldn’t know from the piece that you’d like them to know?

I did a lot of reporting to recreate scenes. People said it was odd that it got dark [so early] in the afternoon — one of them specifically told me the sun set at 2:00 p.m. I looked it up and did some research on the web to confirm that’s when the sun set. I went to Google to see what does this building really look like; what the weather was; what the temperature was; was it really raining this day; what do buses in Stockholm look like; what is the menu at F12. It just seemed very important to reconstruct those things to give people a sense of the place. Those are little things that might end up as a phrase here or a word there, but they bring everything into bold relief.

This week about 200 science writers gathered in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin for a conference on Science Writing in the Age of Denial, hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with support from the National Association of Science Writers. (Conference hashtags: #sciencedenial, and then, when that hashtag was temporarily disabled by spam, #denialconf).

In case you’re just hearing about this conference now and wondering what this is all about, here’s a quick summary from the conference website:

Science writers now work in an age where uncomfortable ideas and truths meet organized resistance. Opposing scientific consensus on such things as anthropogenic climate change, the theory of evolution, and even the astonishingly obvious benefits of vaccination has become politically de rigueur, a litmus test and a genuine threat to science. How does denial affect the craft of the science writer? How can science writers effectively explain disputed science? What’s the big picture? Are denialists ever right?

Day 1 featured plenary speakers Arthur Lupia (Communicating Science in Politicized Environments); Sean B. Carroll (The Denial of Evolution, and the Evolution of Denial: We Have All Been Here Before); Gary Schwitzer (Cheerleading, Shibboleths and Uncertainty); and Naomi Oreskes (Neoliberalism and the Denial of Global Warming); and star-studded panels associated with each. Day 2 was a series of workshops digging into how science writers can apply insights about science denialism to improve the reach, integrity, and impact of their work.

Because I was involved in helping organize the workshops portion of the conference, I didn’t take many notes along the way — so here, rather than recapping the conference myself, I’m aggregating the many blog posts, news articles and Storify collections that have captured the essence of this meeting. Here’s what people have been saying about the conference (If I’ve missed something you think should be included, get in touch):

Summaries from the conference website by UW students

Christie Aschwanden, Last Word on Nothing: The Impasse: When the “truth wins” assumption fails (crossposted in Grist)

Charlie Petit, Knight Science Journalism Tracker: U. Wisconsin-Madison: Science Writing in the Age of Denial an undeniable success

John Rennie, The Gleaming Retort: Recap of “Science Writing in the Age of Denial”  Part 1 and Part 2

Chris Mooney, Point of Inquiry podcast interview with Naomi Oreskes

Nathan Seppa, Science News: Science denial in the 21st century

Chuck Quirmbach, Wisconsin Public Radio: Science-Climate Denial Gap Explained

Zen Faulkes, NeuroDojo: The denial manual

Erin Podolak, Science Decoded: Thoughts on Science Writing in the Age of Denial

Kate Prengaman’s storify

Maryn McKenna, Superbug: Science Writing and Denialism: Accuracy, Clarity, Courage

A couple of conference speakers have also made their slidesets available:

• A compressed version of the slides for Gary Schwitzer’s plenary talk, “Cheerleading, Shibboleths and Uncertainty“
• An expanded version of the slides Ivan Oransky used for his panel talk, ”Evaluating Medical Evidence for Journalists“

Denial in Madison, Wisconsin: Ice fishing on open water

Yesterday I learned that there are only about 25 spots left for the Science Writing in the Age of Denial conference (@sciencedenial) to be held in Madison, Wisconsin on April 23-24 — get one while you still can. I’ve been involved in helping plan the workshops portion of the conference, and I’m awfully excited about it. The cast of distinguished science writers and researchers who will be speaking at or attending this conference is amazing, and far too lengthy to list here. I couldn’t be more thrilled that these amazing folks will be in my back yard for a few days this spring. (Well, not literally in my back yard — though if anyone has a few hours to spare while you’re in town, I have some bricks that need moving.)

From the conference website:

Science writers now work in an age where uncomfortable ideas and truths meet organized resistance. Opposing scientific consensus on such things as anthropogenic climate change, the theory of evolution, and even the astonishingly obvious benefits of vaccination has become politically de rigueur, a litmus test and a genuine threat to science. How does denial affect the craft of the science writer? How can science writers effectively explain disputed science? What’s the big picture? Are denialists ever right?

Day 1 will feature an outstanding slate of plenary speakers: Arthur Lupia (Communicating Science in Politicized Environments); Sean B. Carroll (The Denial of Evolution, and the Evolution of Denial: We Have All Been Here Before); Gary Schwitzer (Cheerleading, Shibboleths and Uncertainty); Naomi Oreskes (Neoliberalism and the Denial of Global Warming); and star-studded panels associated with each.

Day 2 will be a half-day series of workshops digging into how science writers can apply insights about science denialism to improve the reach, integrity, and impact of their work. The workshops will cover a wide range of practical issues that science writers covering controversial topics encounter, such as vetting sources and  understanding hidden agendas, achieving fairness without false balance, navigating ethical quandaries, finding viable markets…and more.

(Bonus: Madison is lovely in late April. Really.)

So: You should come!

Welcome back for another installment of Ask TON. (Wondering what Ask TON is? See here for background information and our introductory post. Click on “Ask TON” above to see previous installments.)

Today’s question:

I’d like to do more international travel as part of my work. I don’t really know how to begin finding stories in foreign countries, either in advance of travel or while I’m there. What are the best ways to do this?

Photo courtesy of Maryn McKenna

We put this question to several of our colleagues, and got a wealth of (well-traveled) advice:

Freelance science and environmental journalist Doug Fox:

When I was getting ready to embark on a 4-month reporting trip to Australia in 2001, I used a brute-force approach to idea hunting before I left. This consisted of repetitive Pubmed searches. I searched for all papers in the last 10 years or so with an author affiliation of “Australia” in high-profile journals, plus a list of other journals that were of specific interest. This had the problem of sometimes yielding papers in which an Australian was one of the authors—but the main work was happening somewhere else. So I combined this with other, more region-specific search terms like: marsupial, monotreme, macropod, stromatolite, Ediacaran, Archean, reef, crocodile, opal—or really, anything I found interesting. I viewed probably 5,000 abstracts, marked 100 that were interesting, followed up with 20 researchers, and ended up with 6 features in New Scientist plus 1 in Discover. It was an incredibly uncreative approach—and probably would not have yielded much in many developing countries where a lot of the local scientists are publishing in journals that may not be listed in major databases (or where the stories aren’t centered on academic researchers in the first place). But for my purposes it worked surprisingly well, and I repeated it for a second trip a couple of years later.

Freelance journalist Emily Sohn:

One of the great appeals of being a freelancer is that you can go anywhere and write, but the reality is usually less glamorous. Editors are very quick to spot (and reject) a “let me write about my vacation!” kind of pitch, and magazine travel budgets, unfortunately, are not what they used to be.

Still, I think opportunities are there if you go about it the right way. I’ve had a lot of success getting stories out of trips and vacations that I’m planning to go on anyway, and starting with those trips can be a great way to get the experience you’re craving. The key is to do plenty of legwork before you go (and to give up on the idea that your vacations will ever be completely relaxing or work-free again)!

My usual strategy is to start with a mega-research blitz via Google. I am drawn to animals and conservation topics, so I’ll search exhaustively for environmental groups working in the area I’m heading, starting with major international organizations and working down towards highly local groups. Then, I send out tons of e-mails and I make lots of phone calls, with the goal of finding someone – anyone – who will be conducting research in the field while I’m there. Be prepared to turn up a ton of projects that are not very interesting and plenty of really cool-sounding work that is not going to be in progress during your trip.

Eventually, though, I almost always find at least one or two possibilities and then I set up very specific plans to meet with the scientists at a certain place and time so that I can follow them around and see what they do. For me, this strategy has led to some really interesting situations: an afternoon checking camera traps with jaguar researchers in Costa Rica, a visit to a camel research center in India, and a week with a lemur researcher in Madagascar (during my honeymoon!), just to name a few. Another way to go about it is to scan published literature or university websites, looking for scientists doing research in the area you’re going. Contact them, and they might offer to let you visit their labs or tell you about colleagues you might want to talk to. I took one trip — a week on a dive boat in Fiji — as the guest of a coral reef conservation organization.

Turning those visits into stories is a separate and often, much harder, step. It’s absolutely worth pitching what you turn up before you go, but editors are often wary to assign before they know what the “story” is going to be, and it’s really hard to know what the story is going to be until you’ve lived it. It can help to communicate before you leave with editors who you have longstanding relationships with. Even then, though, I most often get responses like, “Sure, if you find something good, I’ll consider it.” So, there’s some leap-of-faith behavior required, but I figure if I’m going to be there anyway, it can’t hurt to meet up with someone interesting whose work might fit somewhere into some story someday, hopefully sooner but maybe later. Almost always, a fun visit in the field produces plenty of fodder for a really colorful and convincing pitch. Sometimes, I send these pitches while I’m away. Other times, I wait until I get home and am ready to do the hard work. My personal motto has always been that writing makes my traveling better and traveling makes my writing better. So even if nothing comes out of a self-funded field trip (at least not directly), there are many indirect benefits to having fascinating life experiences and meeting new people. And if you do manage to sell something from the trip, boom! – You now have a great clip that proves you can report from abroad, and that can give you a big boost in your future pitches about international stories.

No matter how you look at it, the conclusion is the same: Go!

Print and radio journalist Cynthia Graber:

I feel like there are two ways to approach this question, and they depend on whether you already have a country in mind, or whether you’re just look over the options. So I’ll give you suggestions based on two different types of reporting trips.

Trip 1: You have a country in mind, but no stories at all.

I was visiting a friend in Hong Kong, and then we were going to spend a weekend together in Thailand. I knew I wanted to stay for a week in Thailand and work. I was looking for stories that fit the show where I was a part-time producer, which covered issues of international poverty and justice. And, following my personal interest, I was particularly interested in science, sustainability, and conservation issues.

Photo courtesy of Maryn McKenna

I started doing random searches on Thailand on Google and LexisNexis. I looked at what was being covered about the country. I read local Thai newspapers in English, which was a great way to find stories that might have international appeal but hadn’t been covered in the international press.

This is how I found out about a movement of monks working on behalf of AIDS patients. I looked into the topic and made some phone calls, and it turned out that the monks were crucial in facilitating acceptance of AIDS sufferers in the greater community. And they still worked in villages all over northern Thailand, bringing food and comfort, helping create jobs, and even teaching sex-ed. I knew it’d make for great radio. (How I ended up reporting this story is an adventure in itself, and contains many lessons about what to do when you finally arrive.)

Another story also spun out of an idea I’d found while still in the US, and then that story spun into not only a radio feature, but two print stories. There were additional challenges there, because I reported much of one of the magazine features from back in the U.S. after my trip. But that, again, is a story unto itself.

Trip 2: You have a story that you really want to do in country X, but you need to bulk up the trip with more stories.

This happened last year with a reporting trip to Peru. I was inspired by a particular topic, and I wanted to go to Peru to cover it. The same radio show (which has since folded) was willing to fund the trip, but they needed a package of stories.

Again, I started conducting random searches on Peru. But this time, I focused my research on the topic I was already covering, and looked into different angles, or related stories. I found an article from the Guardian from 1997, and I discovered that the current work of that nonprofit had morphed into something that would make a great story. I also exchanged emails and spoke on the phone with a press person at an agricultural research center that is somewhat related to my original interest, and I found the angle that I wanted to cover. Finally, I found a story from last year that had received extensive coverage in the UK but almost none in the US, and I knew that it could be both updated and expanded.

The aforementioned radio show folded after I had planned my stories but before I had gone to report them. I ended up selling all three to the radio show The World (before I went), sold one to Smithsonian.com (also in advance), and left myself open to other story ideas and other venues.

I managed to report all planned stories, and an additional one came about serendipitously. I met someone with whom I’d corresponded from the U.S. – I visited his family’s farm, and I was fascinated by some breeding research conducted by his father. I conducted a spur-of-the-moment official interview, which spun into a section of a magazine story.

Lastly, in looking for stories and doing research on Peru in advance – and certainly in reporting from Peru – it helped that I was able to speak Spanish.

Overall advice: Choose a country. Read all sorts of random articles. Find topics that interest you. Find centers conducting research that interests you. Examine angles of stories you hope to cover, and see if there’s anything else to report. Send emails. Pick up the phone and call people.

And once you go, just talk to everyone, and be open to surprises.

Writer and editor Hillary Rosner:

I tend to plan things out before I travel, because there’s usually a

time constraint — and also because I like to get assignments ahead of
time whenever possible. If time is no issue, then just get on a plane
and go — stories will unfold before you! But to home in on potential
stories beforehand, there are two main ways to begin: hunting around
on your own, and asking people you know to hunt around for you. Doing
both is your best bet.

Let’s say you like to write about conservation biology, and you’re
headed to London. First, email a half dozen conservation biologists or
people related to the field who you’ve interviewed in the past. Tell
them you’re going to London, and is there anyone they could suggest
who’s doing interesting work in the UK. Then, start searching on your
own. Pick a handful of universities in or near London and look up
their conservation biologists. See what they’re working on. Email them
and tell them you’re coming and looking for interesting stories. Then
move on to conservation groups — either ones based in London, or big
international ones. Next, think about other research centers or
groups — in this case, museums or societies (like the Zoological
Society of London). Contact them. Crumbs of stories will present
themselves, and you can follow the trail from there.

If you’re talking about traveling to a smaller or more remote
place — say, Malaysian Borneo — you’ll want to start by identifying the
individual scientists who do fieldwork there. Often the best option is
so start with a very broad web search and pursue different leads until
they reveal something good or dead-end — kind of like a
choose-your-own-adventure book. Start with a web search on really
basic terms (Borneo, rainforest, biology, conservation, etc), and
drill down.

Meantime, start reading the local press and set some Google alerts.

Freelance journalist Brendan Borrell:

International reporting is a stressful, headache-causing, time-wasting, break-even and, sometimes, money-losing proposition. Think about all the things that can go wrong with a story in the U.S. – now add in travel arrangements, foreign bureaucracies, and language difficulties. If you’re not dissuaded, then let’s talk about the process of finding stories that can get you onto a plane. There are basically two ways this is going to happen for a beginning freelancer. The first is that you have a bombproof feature idea, and you already have a good relationship with a magazine that has a big travel budget. Barring that, Plan B is to just drop into the country of your choice and hope to make a splash with editors stateside, as Phillip Robertson did when he snuck into Iraq on an inflatable raft.

Even after six years of freelancing, my approach is often a combination of the two. I start with one good story idea that gets me psyched for going to a particular destination, and then I try to find other stories in the same region. Last year, for instance, I met a scientist at a conference and became interested in a story in the remote Indonesian province of Papua. It was a good feature, but I knew that the places where I could sell it would not expense my entire trip on top of my story fee. So I read Indonesian newspapers every morning, talked to lots of scientists and conservationists, and just had my story compass pointed towards Asia. It didn’t take long before I had commitments from several editors, and an itinerary for a five-week trip that would theoretically net a profit.

If that’s too scary for you, it’s also worthwhile to look into grants like those offered by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting or the International Reporting Project, but that adds another layer to the process.

Science magazine’s Asia News Editor Richard Stone:

When it comes to finding stories in foreign countries, there’s no substitute for living abroad. Many ideas germinate over coffee or a meal with sources, or from monitoring local press reports. Being close to the news, one hears about interesting things faster. But while you may be at a disadvantage reacting to developments or searching for stories from far away, don’t despair.

As with any other story that you undertake proactively, let your curiosity guide you. If you intend to pitch an editor on an overseas trip, to be persuasive you better be passionate about the topic. Of course, before you start digging, save yourself time and heartache and check whether the outlet you intend to pitch has recently covered that ground.

I’ve long had a fascination for Angkor Wat, the ancient temple complex in Cambodia, and several years ago was determined to find a story that would take me there. I was surprised that Science hadn’t published more than a tiny blurb on Angkor. I figured there had to be interesting archaeology going on there, and via the Internet learned about a researcher at the University of Sydney who had a provocative new hypothesis about why the Angkor kingdom collapsed.

To get a green light for my dream trip to Cambodia, I’d need to thoroughly research the story in advance – much more so than for a story that doesn’t involve travel. I talked to as many experts about Angkor as I could before flying there. I had to verify that the researcher at Sydney had credibility, size up other hypotheses for the demise of Angkor, and see if there were other threads to the story that I hadn’t immediately grasped. A story may change – and if so, it’s much better to modify your reporting plans before the trip.

Casting a wide net may also tip you to something that never would have occurred to you otherwise. For example, I had sold my editor on a trip to Kazakhstan to report about lingering health effects of fallout from Soviet atomic bomb tests in the 1960s. One scientist urged me to ask the Kazakhs about plutonium in the soil at the defunct test site. That led to the revelation of a U.S. military program to prevent the plutonium in Kazakhstan from falling into the hands of terrorists. Although the health effects were my main objective at the outset, they became a sidebar to the sexier expose.

In many countries, access to scientists and facilities is much harder, generally speaking, than you might be accustomed to in the United States and Europe. Some years ago I intended to write about physicists who risked their lives working inside the damaged nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine. I arranged to visit the Chernobyl power plant, but because a meeting with the physicists wasn’t explicitly on my itinerary, I wasn’t given access to the scientists. Instead I was given a tour of the power plant, and ended up having to make a second trip to Ukraine for the story. Fortunately I was based in Russia at the time, so it wasn’t hugely expensive. But the lesson I learned from the initial failure was priceless.

There’s a lot of ground to cover overseas, and fewer intrepid journalists than you might think. Just follow the Boy Scout motto: Be prepared.

What can you share about your experiences? Leave your suggestions in the comment section below.

*

Welcome back for another installment of Ask TON. (Wondering what Ask TON is? See here for background information and our introductory post. Click on “Ask TON” above to see previous installments.)

Today’s question:

I’m never sure if it’s OK to “just say no” to an editor’s edits. Do you view the edits more as decisions that have been made, or as strong suggestions that can be discussed or negotiated? And how late in the editing process can a writer feel comfortable making substantive changes to a story?

We asked some of our peers for their input, and here’s what they had to say:

Freelance science writer and editor Liza Gross says:

Most every writer has suffered the indignity of seeing her (obviously) pristine copy hacked to bits at some point (usually by an inexperienced editor). But all the horror stories notwithstanding, most every writer can benefit from a skilled editor. And skilled editors usually don’t tinker with prose for no reason.

Ideally, editors and writers work as a team, each contributing their own expertise. Editors know what their outlets and readers need and might tweak the angle, point of view, voice, style, or focus of a story to serve those needs. But writers know their material better than anyone else. After all, we do all the reporting, background research, interviews, fact checking, and obsessing over details. Still, sometimes what we think is on the page isn’t. That’s why I look at an editor’s changes as an opportunity to improve my writing. As Truman Capote once said, “Good writing is rewriting.”

How I perceive and respond to edits depends on how well I know the editor, but, in general, I view any changes as suggestions subject to negotiation. While I don’t typically “just say no” to an edit that I’m not comfortable with, I never hesitate to question the rationale for an edit I disagree with. Chances are the editor was trying to fix something that wasn’t working. If I can see the problem, I’ll always suggest an alternative. If I can’t figure out what the problem was, I’ll ask. If an edit inadvertently introduces an error, it’s my obligation to say so and suggest a way to resolve the issue. You aren’t doing an editor any favors by ignoring an introduced mistake.

A fruitful editor-writer relationship, like any good relationship, depends on keeping the lines of communication open. A good editor expects at least some pushback from a writer. But you should choose your battles. If you think a change destroys your carefully crafted prose without adding any value, by all means, speak up. But don’t make a habit of contesting inconsequential edits.

You should be very careful about making substantive changes late in the process. How late is acceptable depends on the type of story and deadline you have. Longer features with long lead times tend to have more leeway for major changes and rewrites than news stories with tight deadlines. The only time I made substantive changes late in the game was when new data came to light that required recalculating several figures in a follow-the-money feature story. If you happen upon new facts or events that you think change the story enough to warrant significant revisions, you should tell your editor. But asking for late changes runs the risk of introducing errors, especially for outlets with a small staff. If you find errors that change the focus of the story, your editor will want to know. I wouldn’t ask for late changes lightly, especially if it’s just a question of style rather than accuracy. When in doubt, approach your editor with a sense of humility and respect, explain any concerns you may have, and your interactions will likely go smoothly.

Freelancer Mark Schrope handles his edits this way:

I once interned at a newspaper where there had been a writer who was so convinced of each of her story’s perfection that she got angry and even fought with her editor if he changed anything at all. And the editor told me he had to admit that for the most part, there really wasn’t anything that needed changing. Neither that editor, nor any of those that have followed would say the same about the drafts I’ve sent them, and I’ve never had any illusions of such perfection in my writing. But figuring out the right balance between my first draft and an edited version can sometimes be a challenge.

One of the first things I do if I get back a story that is covered in questions and virtual red ink, assuming there’s time, is to let it sit. I’ll give the edited version a quick read, maybe flag some items that are going to need follow up with sources, then leave it alone for a night or so. On first read, an edited version might induce much grimacing – it might even feel like a gut punch. But as any shock fades, I often realize that the editing wasn’t nearly as heavy-handed as it first appeared. And I usually realize that at least some of the changes really helped. As it turns out, there’s a reason we have editors.

Whether possessed with the self-confidence to believe your work nearly flawless, ready to accept every change as needed, or somewhere in between, there are some general guidelines that can help you through the editing process. I try to keep a few things in mind throughout. In the absence of very strong evidence to the contrary, I’d suggest assuming:

1) Your editor wants (just as much as you do) to end up with a good story of which everyone can be proud.

2) Your editor is not a buffoon.

3) Your editor is not mean and has no particular interest in hurting you or making your life miserable.

4) Your editor doesn’t think you’re a buffoon just because he or she felt compelled to do some editing. (Note: Your editor may in fact think you a complete buffoon. The relevant point is that the editing is not necessarily the indicator.)

With those principles in mind, you’ll be looking at your editor as partner, rather than foe. The issue becomes one of picking your battles wisely, though I hate to even mention that cliché, not only because it’s a cliché, but because if you’re really thinking of these things as battles then you’ve left behind one or more of the principles above.

Because a sentence, paragraph, or the entire story looks different than it did when you wrote it is not a good reason to argue over edits. So when my instinct is to challenge, I have to decide if it is a battle worth fighting for some concrete reason.

The most obvious concern is a factual error. The writer is obviously going to be in the best position to spot these, so I try to decide whether an edit has introduced anything even a shade off. If so, I’ll add a note explaining the problem and usually suggesting a correction. This is the kind of thing you have to come back to as many times as it takes to make sure the factual error is corrected.

Sometimes an editor will be bound and determined to take a story in a direction it really can’t or shouldn’t go. They may ask for quotes or facts that simply don’t exist and you have to explain why. When you have this kind of discussion (as with any changes and corrections): if you’ve worked with your editor as a partner and not behaved like a horse’s arse, you’re much more likely to find an editor willing to work with you towards a mutually acceptable solution.

The writer should also consider whether what he or she wants is realistic. In print especially, an upper word count may be set in stone. No matter how much you whine about your limit and contend it should be raised, if that’s not an option, you have to quit worrying about the world you’d like to live in and make the best story you can within the pesky confines of reality.

Another important consideration is if there is something that’s absolutely essential to the story that’s been lost: that usually happens when the editor, like you, is trying to get down to the right word count. If space is an issue and you’re going to make the case for essentiality (I have to confess I didn’t even know that was a real word and fully expected a red squiggle line to appear), then remember reality. It’s generally a good idea to make suggestions about some way to cut an equivalent number of words somewhere else to make room for your essential [pieces]. Sadly, though, unlike factual errors, this is a situation where you may have to give up and let it slide.

Those are the two main categories that have to be dealt with most aggressively, though there are plenty of other possibilities. If I think something sounds goofy, or otherwise doesn’t fit, I’ll try to fix that, but I’m not going to waste a lot of energy if the editor isn’t willing to budge. I assume I’m not the only one among us who has at times received copy back that seems to hardly resemble what I wrote. In those cases, I usually assume it’s unlikely I’m going to get back to something that feels like my own voice.

If you’ve done all you can to address the most important stuff, to fight the necessary battles, and some intractable concerns remain, just remind yourself of how sick you are of reading the blasted thing. Once you accept the remaining edits, then you get to finally move on.

Freelancer Amanda Mascarelli adds:

I view edits as strong suggestions, but I absolutely see the editing process as one that is open to discussion and negotiation. After all, my name is on the story, and I need to be able to stand behind what’s written there. I am the one who reported the story, did the background research, and best understands the nuances of the topic and what the sources said to me.

However, that said, I try to choose my battles wisely. If I’m going to feel sick at my stomach when I see something in print, or ashamed to send the link to my sources, then I attempt to explain to the editor why I feel so strongly about the edits in question. I’ve been quite fortunate in this area and have never had an editor make substantive changes that I couldn’t live with.

In a couple of cases, with quick turnaround news stories, I’ve had editors write headlines that I thought were misleading or that missed an important subtlety. In one case, an editor changed the title based on my input; in another, the editor pushed back and said that the title wasn’t technically wrong and that the subtleties were explained within the story. I thought he made a valid point, and I moved on.

In another story that comes to mind, I questioned an edit that was made because I was concerned that it might be worded too strongly and may have overstated a potential link. I registered my concern with the editor, and I checked in with a source for a second opinion on the wording of the sentence. After some back and forth with the editor and input from the source, the editor and I agreed to let her edit stand. Although I felt that the story could have benefitted from some additional detail to explain the nuances, we didn’t have the space. I let it go and overall felt fine about it.

When it comes to timing, obviously the earlier in the process you take issue with an edit, the better. I try very hard to do all I can to make my editors’ jobs easier, and I know they appreciate not having last-minute surprises. The further along the story is in production, the harder it gets to make substantial changes without having to do significant rewriting. But sometimes small things jump out at me upon the final read – such as when the story is laid out in galley form and I’m taking a broader look – and I absolutely point them out to the editor. Neither of us wants the story to contain errors, and both of us want the story to be its best. I try to see myself as part of a team with the editor; while doing everything I can to avoid being a pain in the butt, I will speak up when I need to so that I can be proud of the final product.

Finally, Helen Pearson, chief features editor for Nature, says:

I hope that writers will discuss edits with me and push back — within reason.

Writers should always speak up if an edit has made something factually incorrect, or if the edit creates the wrong impression about a subject. If a writer disagrees with the structure of the story, or the style of the writing in the edit, then I’m happy to discuss and negotiate and I’ll try to accommodate changes if I agree they are important. (I actually worry if the writer accepts an edit with barely a murmur, because I wonder how carefully they’ve read the edit and how much they really care about the story!) There is a limit to how much the edit can be negotiated. I edit features, in which we’re lucky enough to have one or two weeks to perfect an edit, sometimes more. After the first — and biggest — line edit, I expect to have some discussion and push-back. That’s the time for the writer to speak up.

But as the story nears the final version, I really want to keep changes to a minimum. When the story is about to go to press, then changes should only be very minor, for accuracy. (News editors with much tighter turnaround times have much less time for negotiation.) I try to be sensitive to the writer’s words and voice; I really want them to feel happy and confident about the story. At the same time, I hope that the writer will appreciate that I’ve spent many hours working out how best to edit a story, and that edits are made for a reason: to make something clearer, more logical, more suitable for our audience, or to fit on page. Most writers understand this very well and are a pleasure to work with.

What are your thoughts on this issue? Leave your answer in the comment section below.

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(Photo at top: “Backspace” by Michael Tienzo, via Flickr)

Gabriel Spitzer

Clever Apes, a science series that airs on the Chicago public radio station WBEZ, won the 2011 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award in the Radio category. Gabriel Spitzer, host and founder of the show, created the WBEZ science beat, and works with producer Michael De Bonis on the bimonthly segment.

In this TON podcast, Spitzer tells guest contributor Cynthia Graber how he got the series off the ground, how he delves into the Chicago science scene, and how he goes behind the scenes to make the people and stories come alive on the radio:

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A recent Clever Apes podcast: Skipping down memory lane

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WBEZ has received funding from the following foundations:

Joyce Foundation

National Science Foundation

Field Foundation

Elizabeth Morse Charitable Foundation

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Cynthia Graber

Guest Contributor Cynthia Graber is an award-winning radio and print reporter whose work has appeared on Scientific American’s podcast and on the public radio shows The World, Living on Earth, the World Vision Report, and Latino USA; and in print publications including the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Scientific American, and Smithsonian.com. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Follow Cynthia on Twitter @cagraber.

Soren Wheeler

When hundreds of snow geese landed in and subsequently died from Berkeley Pit’s toxic water, some of the microbes the geese carried found a home in the Butte, Montana lake and started soaking up the lake’s toxins. Bioremediation, however, isn’t the subject of Radiolab senior producer Soren Wheeler’s story, “Even the worst laid plans?” Instead, Wheeler says, as in all Radiolab pieces, the show’s goal is to deliver “awe.” In 2011, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Radiolab’s co-host and producer Jad Abumrad a half-million dollar “genius” grant in recognition of the show’s “engaging audio explorations of scientific and philosophical questions.” But Radiolab is far from a one-man show created by a genius toiling alone in the studio. Here, Soren Wheeler tells TON guest contributors Robert Frederick and Corinna Wu the story behind the story of the Berkeley Pit, revealing some of the inner workings of Radiolab’s genius style:

How much of this story did you know before you started?

I grew up not far away from Butte and the Berkeley Pit. It had kind of mythic proportions in the minds of the kids who grew up in my town.

“Auditor” — a dog who lived around the Berkeley Pit — had 128 times the amount of arsenic found in a typical dog’s hair. Photo by Shawn McDevitt.

Ten years ago or so, this piece came out in the local Butte newspaper about a dog [named Auditor] that had been living around the pit mining area. It looked like a shepherding dog, but with these yellowed, nasty dreads hanging all around it that covered its eyes. It looked like some kind of monster from the swamp. It lived around the pit area for 17 years. And this is the kind of landscape where walking on the soil or near the water will eat through rubber boots.

So I thought that was great: Here’s this crazy looking alien dog that seems to defy all expectations of how life should live. At the time I was doing a science writing master’s degree at Johns Hopkins, and I wrote one of my stories for that class about the dog. [See Wheeler’s 2007 story for Plenty magazine.]

That story just stuck with me so much and seemed to resonate with the people who read it that I just started digging more and more into Butte, looking at health problems, other things that had to do with the pit, all these horrible environmental catastrophes. Through doing that, I ended up interviewing Don and Andrea Stierle. I was sitting in their office, and they were telling me they look at microbes that live in the pit. And then they told me the story of the goose microbes. So I had reported out that whole story in my master’s thesis. As soon as I came to Radiolab, I was pitching that idea.

When you started pitching the idea to Radiolab, did you know that writer Edwin Dobb had already done an article for Discover magazine about the Stierles’ research?

The Discover magazine story was long out, I think. He talked about finding life in the pit, and he’d talked to Don and Andrea. He’s written more about Butte and the pit than just that, too. But none of that had the goose thing. Don and Andrea did not tell him the goose [microbe] bit of the story, which is why I decided to focus the Radiolab piece on it.

We could have done a lot of things. We could have done something about the dog, too. But the goose [story] just seemed to have this redemptive quality. It just felt like the way the whole story wraps at the end is what we wanted to go with.

Wheeler’s piece was one segment of a Radiolab show with the theme of “Oops!” Hear from “Oopsie Wheeler” about one “oops” that didn’t make it to the show.

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How did this story’s structure evolve?

I knew it would begin with Don and Andrea. The first thing I knew about them was that they saw each other and fell in love at first sight. They’re just this ridiculously cute couple. They moved from beautiful San Diego and ended up in Butte, Montana. I knew I wanted to start with them in a way that gives you a sense of two characters that are lovable ending up in a place where they don’t want to be. That becomes then a way of motivating you to care about the place they ended up.

Berkeley Pit

Once you start imagining the place, the structure plays out pretty simply from there: you tell the history of Butte, you get up to the point where the pit was created — so you’re doing a little bit of chronology, you stare at the pit, and what you see raises a question of how it got there, and then you’re just following Don and Andrea’s story again with the weird twist with the geese — their story and the story of Butte kind of collide back together at the end.

I just told you the structure, but I’m not sure I told you much about how we came to that structure. I mean, with every piece we do, we try one thing; we chuck it out; we try another; we move this there; we move that there; but I think in this case the structure was not a big problem.

Wheeler emphasizes a common technique in radio: Cut interviews for emotion instead of for information. (Caution: Expletives used.)

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And so how many interviews are we talking about here?

I must have done the initial interview with the Stierles sometime over Christmas when I was back home. And then that failed and I did a studio interview with them. There was an interview with Edwin Dobb. Then we also sent Barrett Golding to the pit…and I lined him up with the [three] scientists he’s talking to. And then I took Jad [Abumrad] into the studio.

Without “scene tape” and truly being there, Wheeler says the story would not have run.

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How long did this story take to create, start to finish?

I was trying to make the story happen for at least three or four months. But once we have all the interviews done, and we’re actually trying to do production and scoring and story structure and tracking and all that kind of stuff, I would guess this one took at least a week or two for me, and then three or four days of Jad’s time.

Why have Jad as an audience member, as if we’re listening to you tell the story to Jad rather than you telling the audience directly?

I think the spirit of the show is about Jad and Robert [Krulwich] hearing things and reacting to them — things they don’t know about and things they can share with the other one. So the hope is that there’s something in attitude and in stance that comes across when it’s me telling my friend Jad about this crazy story I heard, rather than me telling the radio audience about what I heard. I use different words when I’m in a conversation than I do if I write out a script. I’m a better narrator when Jad’s in the room because I’m talking to him.

Also, Jad can play the role of the audience member who maybe has a question, and because I’m so steeped in the story I’m telling, or I know so much about it, I don’t realize there’s really a question. He can sort of pop in, and that other voice somehow invites the listener in more. It makes them feel like the narrator is someone who can be questioned, is a real person, is not just steamrolling past them with a bunch of information, and Jad is trying to be an advocate for the listener and not let things go on too long or too deep without understanding what is really going on.

One of Wheeler’s metaphors for making good radio: Tell the story like you’re at a cocktail party.

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So nothing is scripted? Jad hadn’t heard the story before?

Right after I pitched the story, and they heard [the pitch] and liked it, I just took Jad in the studio and said, “OK, Butte is this crazy town that I grew up next to…” and told him the story. And we probably did that for an hour, just to get versions of me that feel relaxed and easy, and to get versions of him having heard none of this and knowing nothing.

I’ll bet if you took all the tape of Jad and me talking, you’d have a couple hours of tape. And if you collected all the things I said in that piece, you’d have a minute or two minutes.

Not a performance, not a conversation, but more of a hybrid: Hear one part of Wheeler and Abumrad’s interaction that is purposefully “amped up.”

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[Part of the “amping” it up is] I want you to get excited about this story, and I want you to see how I was seeing it when I first heard it. When you want to tell a story, you’ve got to really want to bring people in. [In amping it up we were] capturing how I felt about it when I first heard it.

On telling the story as “exciting talkers.”

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How do you go about picking the music and sound effects?

Occasionally in Radiolab pieces, Jad will actually compose something. In this case, there’s no written music. These were all bits of music that were found. The holy music was probably some 17th-century Gregorian chant thing. It’s all classical music that was grabbed and tweaked and played with.

It’s pretty aggressive in the way we take music and modify it and use it more as punctuation than as real accompaniment. We will bring it in, drop it out with a weird phase shift, crank a filter on it. There are moments where it gets drawn out, but it comes and goes. It gets pushed to the background and then dropped back forward. You might hear a piece of music at one point, and when you hear it later, it’s the same piece of music, but the key has been shifted because the mood is slightly different. You’ll feel the recall of an earlier emotion but in a different context.

When words and music dance together: The decline of Butte, in music.

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There’s also a musicality to the back-and-forth. There are times when the voices become a rhythm, and [the voices are] another instrument in a little orchestra. It gives you more to play with. You can create a music with the words that matches the music you’re using underneath.

A music-with-words example: Using the words “and growing.”

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A screenshot of the entire ProTools session: “It’s like a Dadaist painting,” says Wheeler. “You start to stare at these sessions and there are so many different little tiny bits of things happening...yeah, it’s weird. It’s very strange.” Screenshot courtesy of Soren Wheeler.

In terms of the putting together of the sounds and the music and having them drop out in the right ways and rise up in the right ways and shimmer in the right ways…we’ll go back and forth and I’ll try some things and he’ll try some things, and we’ll talk about what works and what doesn’t. But watching Jad play with ProTools is a little like shooting hoops in the driveway with your mom, and Michael Jordan shows up: you feel inadequate and small.

Deconstructing a sound effect: The shimmer.

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How do you choose when not to use music or sound effects?

There are points in the story where to add music and sound effects would be to overdo and overstate it, having it sound like chintzy, ‘40s radio drama. As soon as you start hearing about the geese, there’s no music after that. We could have put the sound of flapping wings as the geese landed or some kind of croak when they died. But that all felt like too much. The story had a power all its own — somehow more powerful when it’s just a person saying, ‘And the geese died.’ Sometimes the words have their own power and emotion that you don’t want to get in the way of.

Giving listeners a resting place: “A pillow for your brain.”

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What did you leave out (or what got cut out) of the story?

I wanted to say a lot more about Butte and a lot more about the science, and we were just dialing that back when it was not working and going too slow.

Half the time, you start out with a story and you think you have this really sharp knife that you can threaten people with, and by the time you look into the details of the story, you’ve actually got yourself a plastic picnic knife that’s not scaring anybody because of all the qualifications and all the arguments. So any science journalist is always standing on this slope of possible qualifications that can just make it feel like your story doesn’t say anything at all.

The way we deal with that, maybe differently than other print journalists or other science journalists on the radio, is just to rejoice in the mystery or embrace the poetry. I don’t want to say we ignore those questions, but we kind of slide past them.

In concluding that the microbes were sort of a “present” from the geese, what was your intention? Did it surprise you that the online comments on this story include references to divine intervention?

One of things that’s unique about Radiolab is that it gets a lot of people listening who otherwise would scoff at science. We do a lot to bring in, not religious per se, but more spiritual, more musical things. We attract people who are not necessarily staunch, atheistic, scientific thinkers. We’re talking about science, but we don’t give you a full dig down on the technical details. But we also take science and treat it poetically, which is risky, risky business.

Selling awe: Tapping into the spot where religion lives.

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Robert Frederick and Corinna Wu want to thank Soren Wheeler for providing a high-quality recording of his interview responses and recordings from the show.

Robert Frederick

Guest Contributor Robert Frederick has created podcasts, radio pieces, videos, and written about science, mathematics, business, and education for a variety of outlets, including Science, Nature, and NPR.

Corinna Wu

Guest Contributor Corinna Wu is a freelance science writer, editor, and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to becoming an independent journalist, she worked on the staffs of U.S. News & World Report, Science News, and the radio show Science Update. She also spent a year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT studying neuroscience and engineering design. Follow Corinna on Twitter @ckwu.

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(Berkeley Pit photo: “Berkeley Pit in Butte, MT” by sporst, via Flickr)

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Welcome back for another installment of Ask TON. (Wondering what Ask TON is? See here for background information and our introductory post. Click on “Ask TON” above to see previous installments.)

Today’s question:

I’m a freelancer, and I want to move from doing straight news stories to features, but I don’t really know how to start looking for ideas. People talk about “saving string” for features, but where do they look for the string? Should I read a lot of scientific journals, or go visit random scientists in their labs, or what?

We put this question to several of our colleagues. Here’s what they had to say:

Science and technology writer Katie Greene:

One way to get started with features is to look for a person to profile. Try to find someone who’s solving an interesting problem in an interesting way. It’s important that this person is a character with quirks, conflicts, or some other compelling attributes.

In reporting news stories, you might actually have some potential profiles right under your nose. When you interview sources, ask them about future projects or big questions they want to answer. Ask them about the unsolved problems in their field. Ask them about colleagues they think are doing interesting work. These conversations could help you see trends that might have been invisible before. A trend plus a personality equals feature gold.

Science reporter Robert Frederick:

If you don’t already ask, “What else are you working on?” of your straight-news-story interviewees, then start.  To extend the “saving string” metaphor, the interviewee’s answer to that question is the loose end of the string.  It is up to you how much you want to tug at it.  Indeed, your interviewee may not want to say much, but if you get a sense there’s an interesting feature story there (and not just a topic, but a story), ask who else is involved in the work and find out who the interviewee’s competition is, if any.  Then, talk with all those people, too.  But really, try to avoid a feature-length story unless the story really interests you.  In particular, you’ll just be doing that kind of feature for money, and it is hard to sustain such interest (without getting cranky) for as long as a feature takes.  Indeed, if you’re not interested in a feature-length story revealed by your string tugging, the best thing to do is to pass the information along to another freelance journalist who may have that interest – eventually other freelancers will start “saving string” for you, too.

Brendan Maher, a features editor for Nature:

The short answer is, yes. Get out of your office and visit people, extend your interviews on other topics to see what people are thinking about and reading about right now. Consult the literature and the lay press and look closely for those unanswered questions that nag at you.  Any of these could be the source for a feature length story.   The longer, more difficult answer is that you simply never know where an idea will come from. It will rarely be one single piece of evidence, but rather one or two things heard in passing (i.e. reading a paper, or talking with a trusted regular source at a meeting, or having a random conversation on a plane, or seeing a single line in a news story that makes you go, “Huh. I wonder if there’s something more to that!”).

Saving string is a good metaphor for it, but it’s a more active process if you want to get to the level of a pitch.  I often think of it as trying to start a fire.  First you need tinder.  So you look in your pockets for lint, the residue of other stories and reporting projects.  Lint is great because it flares quickly, but it also dies quickly. You’ll have more duds than structure fires. So, you have to go search for tinder, kindling, and larger pieces of information.  This often means targeted phone calls to key sources.  Does that little lint ball of an idea that you’ve been keeping in your pocket have any worth?  Does it catch their attention?  Do they want to know more about it?  Most importantly, does that little ball of lint start a fire burning in you to want to tell this story? If it does, you might be ready to pitch.

Metaphors are cheap, however; what you probably want are examples. A few years ago, I saw a number of short news pieces mentioning the first time fMRI evidence was being used in court to help show that a convicted criminal was a psychopath. Several pieces noted the basics of the story, but I wanted more. If this was unprecedented, why [was that the case]? And what were the chances that it would work? What factors about the research would have to be proved in order to get the evidence considered, and what does it say about science’s – particularly neuroscience’s – role in the criminal justice system? The germ was there, and looked promising enough that I asked a freelancer with whom I’d been talking about similar ideas to pursue it.  She took on the task of gathering the kindling and bigger pieces of wood and developing the pitch.  The story became part of a package about science in the courtroom.

What are your tips for developing features? Share them in the comments.

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(Photo at top: “String Theory” by Jody Roberts, via Flickr)

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David Tuller

David Tuller has never shied away from controversial stories. Writing for The New York Times for the last dozen years, he has covered a wide range of topics, including infectious diseases, gay men’s health, his mom’s 80^th birthday, and most recently, chronic fatigue syndrome. Tuller recently wrote a long piece that painstakingly examines, in a way that few if any other journalists have, the role of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the twisted history of research on this hotly debated illness. Here he tells TON guest contributor Julie Rehmeyer about the complexities of covering a disease that is little understood and often scorned, and about how he published the story after editors turned him down. [Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the CDC: A Long, Tangled Tale appeared in virologist Vincent Racaniello’s blog in November 2011.]

What made you interested in writing about chronic fatigue syndrome?

I had a friend who was diagnosed with CFS about 20 years ago. I knew him before he developed CFS and I watched him all these years. He got me interested in XMRV [the virus that for some time appeared to be a possible cause of CFS -- a link that has now been discredited]. The more I looked into it, the more interesting and complicated it was as an issue.

The first time I became aware of your work was last February. I myself have had CFS for years, and it had suddenly gotten so bad that for two months, I had rarely been able to get out of bed and was sometimes too weak to even turn over.

I opened The New York Times one morning and read a story of yours on the controversial PACE study, which claimed that cognitive behavioral therapy and graded exercise therapy are effective therapies for CFS patients. Your story said, “While this may sound like good news, the findings…are certain to displease many patients and to intensify a fierce, long-running debate about what causes the illness and how to treat it… [The study] is expected to lend ammunition to those who think the disease is primarily psychological or related to stress.” But the story didn’t give much context to help readers understand the patients’ discontent or evaluate whether the illness is organic or psychological. Although the story alluded to the controversy around the definition of CFS, it didn’t cite any of the mountain of evidence for physiological abnormalities in CFS patients or quote the many clinicians and researchers who had criticized the study and even considered its recommendations dangerous.

You’ve since written more critically about that research — first in a follow-up story in the Times, and most recently in the lengthy article you wrote on the virologist Vincent Racaniello’s blog. What made you take a deeper look at CFS after that initial story?

When I wrote that first story about the PACE study, I’d been focusing primarily on XMRV, not CFS more generally. I didn’t understand the problem with case definitions [a set of criteria for what symptoms should be required for a person to be diagnosed with CFS], and there was a context of controversy that wasn’t part of my awareness at the time. I wrote that story in a couple hours on deadline. It wasn’t until afterward that I realized that this wasn’t the piece I would have written had I known more about it.

I will say, though, that my story was better than most of the others on it, which for the most part didn’t have any caveats.

What dissatisfied you about the story?

I was driving home when it appeared, and by the time I got home I had half a dozen emails about the piece. I realized that I hadn’t focused on the issue of the case definition. I’ve been a public health student and I teach reporting about public health [at the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and School of Public Health’s new concurrent Master of Public Health/Master of Journalism program]. In the first semester, all public health students have to take epidemiology, and one of the things they learn is that if you’re doing research, you have to have a good case definition so that you know which patients have the illness and which don’t. The PACE study’s definition of CFS is six months of unexplained fatigue — period. It’s not rocket science to figure out that that’s likely to include people who are depressed and don’t have CFS. Fatigue is a common symptom of depression, but people with CFS have some symptoms that are not typical of depression. It was really because of that that I ended up writing a second story, a month or so later, about case definition in CFS. I tried to put it in a larger context — that this issue had been fought over for years, and the PACE trial was the latest variation on it.

What made you want to write an even more in-depth piece, explaining the history of CFS research and relating that to the recent XMRV mess?

Writing the case definition story led me to start looking into the Centers for Disease Control’s role in defining the disease. I found that in 2005, the CDC created a new way of defining the illness. Using that framework, the agency calculated that the prevalence of CFS was four times what everyone else thought it was, and ten times their own previous estimate. But if four to ten times as many people now have it, obviously something is really wrong with your case definition, before or after. William Reeves was head of the CDC’s research program for CFS for two decades, and two years ago, they moved Reeves aside. They never publicly said why, as far as I could tell. Furthermore, in the 1990s, the CDC spent funds allocated for CFS research on other projects, then lied to Congress about it.

I think all of this is really important for understanding why patients can be so suspicious and paranoid. In most of the coverage, the XMRV situation was decontextualized from the experience of patients and history of the illness, although Amy Dockser Marcus did some terrific reporting in the Wall Street Journal about the back story. But no one had really focused in depth on the case definition problem and the CDC’s role in perpetuating that problem.

I didn’t want to write a rant. I wanted to write, “This is what happened with the epidemiology, and this is why the situation is so screwed up.” I wanted something that patients felt represented some of the frustration they’d experienced in the past 20 years.

Did you think of the story as an advocacy piece?

No. I’m not a patient. I didn’t want to write it as an advocate for people with CFS. I wrote it because there was an undertold story. I understood that it was something that would likely be useful to the patient community; to the extent that that’s the case, that’s great. My goal is to tell a story that’s interesting, and one that I think is important. Obviously I do think that the CDC has not done what people expected it to do in this case. I think of writing this piece as being a proper watchdog of a government agency in an area that hasn’t gotten much attention.

What dilemmas did you run into in writing the piece?

In the first version that I sent to a couple of editors, I started off with Dr. Reeves’ saying very soon after the initial XMRV finding that his research team would look for the retrovirus but that he believed they were unlikely to find anything. When he said it, I wondered, “Should he have said that?” After all, his team hadn’t even started looking for it, and there hadn’t been any evidence against the finding at that point. It suggested that he was close-minded and partial. It was particularly remarkable because individuals from all sides were already calling for his ouster, before that point.

But when I looked back on it, [I realized] that story was too in the middle of things to be a good beginning. If you weren’t immersed in the story, you didn’t know why that was something he shouldn’t have said — it took too much explaining. For editors, it must have seemed like, “What was that about?” So I reframed it as a more general piece, with that as an example of his probably poor management skills — but I put it way, way down in the hierarchy of things.

Instead, I decided to start with a patient’s experience of having this and that illness and infection. I thought it was really important to have a credible patient who was understandable, sympathetic and articulate. I thought it would be effective to juxtapose all her health problems with the CDC’s recent research concluding that CFS patients tend to have personality disorders and a history of sexual abuse. Here’s this person dealing with all this terrible medical stuff, and then they’re telling her that she’s kind of crazy. I could then use that to lead into how the CDC really screwed up. I thought that worked better than starting with the gaffe of Dr. Reeves’, which was really in the thicket of all these issues.

From there it was pretty much chronological. I segmented it to some extent by topic, but then it was just a matter of tackling each chunk. It’s complicated to figure out how much detail you need, though: this was a science-literate audience that I was writing for, so some things I didn’t have to go into in as much detail.

One thing that helped tremendously was looking through the minutes, public testimony and recommendations of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Advisory Committee, established to advise the Department of Health and Human Services. Those documents detailed the collapse of all support for Dr. Reeves and provided a few juicy quotes and details. Federal advisory committee minutes are great sources for all kinds of stories but used relatively infrequently.

What lessons can science journalists draw from your experience in writing this story?

Once I started to get what the story was, I was able to listen to patients more carefully. It’s very hard when you’re dealing with a patient population that’s been so mistreated: They interpret every word that’s written through such a fine magnifying glass. I’ve never written about an issue that reverberates so extensively in the blogosphere.

For science journalists writing about complex public health issues, I think it’s important not to take the CDC’s word for it, nor academic researchers, nor the press releases about the studies. Read the studies yourselves. Read the studies criticizing those studies, and the responses to the critics. I think reporters who are writing about epidemiological issues should understand basic epidemiological concepts.

What was the process of trying to sell the story like?

I think it’s hard in general with this issue, because it’s a hard thing to explain to editors as much as anyone else who hasn’t seen it up close. First you have to convince people that it’s an illness and not just a psychological thing, and then you have to explain that the CDC’s program has been really screwed up. That preamble takes so long that it’s hard to explain the story. It’s not a story that you can do in 800 or 1500 words.

I tried four or five places which seemed like they’d be good venues for it and I couldn’t get any traction. I didn’t hear back from a couple of places, and a couple said it was interesting but cited budget problems, or that it just didn’t fit in with what they were doing. I’m sure those things were the case, but I felt like it an element of it was because it was CFS and not a disease with more credibility and a better name. It’s a much harder sell because this is kind of squishy, and people don’t understand it, and there’s no identified cause. No one said, “We don’t really think this disease exists so we don’t want to spend time and money,” nor do I think anyone thought that. But I don’t think it was on anyone’s agenda as an important thing to think about.

It was very frustrating, because I knew it was a story. But then I thought, “Am I crazy? Maybe it’s not a story.” I had a colleague at the journalism school who said, “No, this is an important story.” He couldn’t quite understand why no one wanted to publish it. I felt like I got a minor secondary echo of what patients must experience when they go to doctors or talk to people about CFS.

Editors are like the rest of us: if you don’t know someone who has it, it’s hard to understand what it is. And it’s easy to ignore something that makes people homebound and invisible.

What finally led you to decide to publish the story on Vincent Racaniello’s blog?

I felt like I wanted to get this out one way or another. I was thinking that I’d just post it myself and link it to the Berkeley journalism school faculty page, and then I talked to Vince and he said, “Oh yeah, that’d be great.” He said, “Write as long as you feel like you need.” That was really great. I started off to write 2000-3000 words, but it ended up being around 10,000 words. I felt like I was able to touch on all of the issues, though not necessarily in complete depth. Even as it was, there were things I took out and things I didn’t go into enough.

Did this experience leave you wary about trying to pitch big pieces on CFS in the future?

You know, no. There are a couple of other pieces that I’d like to do. It’s made me think I may need to find an alternate way to publish them, or to find a slam-dunk way of pitching them. But the truth is, this is a piece I wanted to write, and I’m glad I wrote it. I’m glad it’s out there, and I like it. I’d love to have gotten paid, but that wasn’t my main priority. I felt like this was an important story that I wanted to tell — I was in a position to tell it and I was going to put it out there. I didn’t need the money to continue to pay my bills. Let me just be clear that I do think writers should be paid fairly for our work! I would never have been able to do this when I was freelancing full time. I’m lucky to have a job, at least for now, with a decent paycheck.

I did get $21 through contributions from the “support science writers” button at Ed Yong’s website. I let him know that would come in handy.

A glimpse behind the scenes:

• Pitch letter

Julie Rehmeyer

Guest contributor Julie Rehmeyer is a math and science writer who contributes regularly to Wired and was a longtime mathematics columnist for Science News. Her work has been included in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2010. She recently wrote an article for Slate on the demise of the XMRV retrovirus theory.

Daniel Engber

When Slate senior editor Daniel Engber took a month off from his usual duties to research a multi-part series on laboratory mice, he had a thesis — that although the ubiquity of mice as model organisms has clear advantages, it is in some ways damaging to biomedicine. What he needed was stories and characters to hang his argument on. Tracking down and sifting through numerous compelling narratives proved to be the most challenging – and also the most fun — aspect of reporting his series. Here, Engber discusses how he found his stories, how he overcame initial reservations about the topic, and how he put the pieces together. He also reveals his “invisible ink” method of battling writer’s block. [The three-part series "The Mouse Trap" (1 | 2 | 3) appeared in Slate on November 16-18, 2011.]

Here, Engber tells the story behind the story:

How did you get the idea for this story?

This one actually comes from the last one of these “Fresca” projects that Slate does [to encourage staffers to pursue long-form projects]. I did my first Fresca project in ’09, on animal welfare in the lab. One of the things I came across was the fact that rats and mice were exempted from the protections provided by the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act of 1966, which led to their becoming extremely popular animal models in biomedical research. I originally had a section of that 2009 Fresca project that was about what it means for the scientific community that we are using rats and mice so much. But the rest of that series was raising questions about animal welfare, and this big question about epistemology would have been kind of out of left field. So we cut that whole piece, which was maybe a 2,500-word section.

Then last year, I was thinking about a new Fresca project to do, and I thought maybe I could come back to this piece that seemed so fascinating to me, so I pitched it. Slate editor David Plotz agreed to do it so long as I was able to find some kind of narrative elements to include, because it was this abstract idea: that everyone’s using rats and mice, and particularly mice over the last 20 years, and that there are both advantages and disadvantages to having this monoculture of knowledge production in biomedicine. I didn’t have the skeleton of the story that I would then graft the idea onto — I just had the argument and no story. So I got a provisional “yes” on doing the project, contingent on my finding something to say.

This is one of those stories where a major set of issues in science seems, in retrospect, to have been hiding in plain sight. Why do you think this subject hasn’t gotten much journalistic attention before?

I think partly it goes back to one of the reasons why scientists are using mice to begin with, which is that they’re not very charismatic. This is a topic that people tend to drift away from because mice and rats tend to make people a little uncomfortable. Even in describing the project to people while I was working on it, people seemed instantly bored as soon as I started talking about mice.

The second thing is that this issue, to the extent that it can be resolved, would be resolved by the granting agencies. There’s nothing that a general Slate reader can do. It worried me throughout, and I tried to emphasize the analogy to monoculture in agriculture — which is directly related to the issue of mouse models — because I think that’s something that resonates more directly with people. Putting the story within that bigger context of the dangers of standardization and globalization, and of how increasing efficiency comes with hidden costs, my idea was that I could tie it in with bigger ideas that might be more exciting for people or affect their world view more broadly. It wasn’t just a story about science funding, but it could be a story about the hidden implications for American society.

What were your first steps in starting to report the story? What were your initial questions, and how did you start out your research?

I had two lines. As I said, I kind of had my thesis in place at the outset, which I think is dangerous for journalists, and unusual — but it came out of reporting from 2009. So having that thesis in mind, I set out to find people who were experts in science funding and biomedicine, like [Nobel Prize-winning former Director of the National Institutes of Health and current Director of the National Cancer Institute] Harold Varmus.

But the more important thing was to figure out the specific stories I was going to tell, because the thesis was so broad and hard to get a handle on. I had heard an interview with [author and journalist] Michael Lewis — I don’t remember what the venue was — and he was talking about his process, and he talked about the “casting calls” he does at the beginning of a project. It’s not like it’s a big secret; everybody knows you have to do something like a casting call when you’re beginning a new project. But I had never heard that phrase before in the journalism context, and it was really useful. It helped me realize that I needed to just get a whole bunch of leads and then do a casting call and find which of these stories and characters were the best.

How did you do that?

I reached out to people I knew who are biomedical researchers and told them I was looking for these kinds of situations: scientists who are trying to start on a new model organism and finding out things they never could have found out using mice or rats; or stories of fields of inquiry where people are coming up against a wall because they’re stuck using the easiest model organisms to use; or people who are making tremendous breakthroughs simply because they’re using the mouse, where you have such precise control of the genome. I started getting messages back with suggestions, and I started following up on those.

I also realized at a certain point that I was casting for topic areas of research. For example, tuberculosis research was one I landed on. I was also casting for characters: scientists I thought were interesting or especially smart, and able and willing to talk about these issues and about the big picture. And then the last thing I was casting for was the animals themselves — that’s how I ended up with the naked mole rats in Part III of the series. They’re just so charismatic that I realized they could be great characters in themselves.

Slate stories tend to take a strong point of view, and this series is no exception. Did you go into reporting this story with a strong point of view in mind, or did that evolve through your reporting?

I came in with a strong point of view that was based on my reporting from earlier. I had to convince myself in the course of reporting it that the point was worth making and not crazy. I mean, you talk to a former head of the NIH and now head of the National Cancer Institute and he doesn’t think it’s such a big problem, and if you’re a rational human being, you think, “I should just scrap this project because this person who probably knows more about this topic than anyone in the world doesn’t think it’s a particular problem.” I did have those thoughts constantly, but I wanted to balance them against all the other people I talked to who did think it was a problem. So while I sometimes had doubts and was trying to figure out how certain I was that this was worth making a big deal out of, I never felt like I was completely on the wrong track. I always felt like what I was saying was true; it was just a question of, is this going to destroy science as we know it, or is it a mildly interesting problem? Where between those two crazy points of view am I?

How did you resolve that issue? What made you decide that the story was in fact worth pursuing?

Once I got the assignment, I wasn’t going to walk away from it — so these were questions from before I even chose this story. That’s one thing about the way we do this at Slate, where you get a month off — once you’re on your month off, there’s no safety net. You have to do it. I guess if you’re taking a flyer on something, maybe there are times when you need to just commit to it, and then figure it out. I thought this was a long shot when I pitched it. I pitched it thinking maybe this is going to be rejected because it’s simultaneously too big and too small — because it’s kind of a niche question and because I didn’t have a narrative. But once David said he was interested in the idea, then I went ahead with it, and quitting was not an option.

But at the end, just as I was finishing, I did have this fear… I’m sure this will be familiar to other science journalists. Scientists are so understated and want to make sure that nothing that’s reported about their work is too sensationalistic. I tend to really internalize that and then I get really nervous about making big statements about the science that I’m writing about, and my editors are always pushing me to make the points bigger. Especially in this series, where Part I of the three is essentially a manifesto, there was some back and forth about how much heat to have in the manifesto. The first version was much tamer than the final version, and that made me anxious because I thought, “What if I turn up the heat and the people I talked to think I went crazy, or other scientists read it and think I was just frothing at the mouth?”

How did scientists respond to the final version?

The response I got from scientists was the most gratifying response that I’ve gotten for a science piece. Scientists, like all specialists, can sometimes be very nitpicky when they leave comments on your article pages or send you emails, but I didn’t get that kind of response. I got very, very thoughtful responses, including a lot of people saying that they were glad that this issue, which seems so nerdy and specific to biomedicine, was being written about in a general-interest magazine.

What was hardest about reporting and writing this series?

I think the hardest thing about reporting it was starting with the argument and finding the story, instead of doing it the other way around, which I think is probably the smarter, better way to do journalism, all things considered.

The hardest thing about writing it was trying to provide some honest-to-goodness science journalism about the various topics — explaining some of the science of tuberculosis while making this bigger point about how biomedicine is done. How do I write about TB research without losing track of the bigger point?

What was your solution?

I tried to focus on the animals because I think people find animals engaging and because that’s what tied everything together. I tried to keep the mouse and the mole rats front and center.

The other really hard part was the places where I tried to pull back and give some grand progression of the history of science. That section on lumpers and splitters — I found that very, very hard to write. I felt like, “Who am I to try to summarize the history of science in three paragraphs?” I felt like a jerk writing those sections, and hated doing it. The solution, or rather more like a cheat, was to use the concept of lumpers and splitters [to explain part of the history of science]. For example, I could talk about how the Black-6 mouse was kind of a tool for lumping. I shoehorned a lot of the history of the science into that discussion.

One thing that was striking about this story for me was the scope of its historical sweep. How did you gather and sort out all that historical material?

I had historian sources. I had the advantage of having access to a wonderful book called Making Mice, by Karen Rader, who is an historian of science. She went into great detail on the history of Jackson Lab and Clarence Little. I also have a good friend who is an historian of science and specializes in animal studies, who gave me a custom-made syllabus of journal articles on the making of model organisms. And then I talked to a lot of historians of science who have worked on these questions.

The history of mazes was really daunting. I just poked around until I found a specialist who had looked at this question, who could tell me what to look for. To start, I talked with a woman named Jacqueline Crawley at the National Institute of Mental Health, who is an expert on mouse phenotyping. She’s been running mice and rats through lab tests for 40 years, so she just knew a lot about mazes. And she also knew which scientists in the world are still using the old-fashioned rat mazes; she directed me to a couple of those, and it turned out that one of those people had just written a review of the history of mazes in research. I also went back to the primary sources looking at some of the early papers using mazes, which was a lot of fun.

In Part II of the series, you provide detailed descriptions of Jackson Lab, one of the world’s biggest breeding facilities. Why did you decide to paint such a vivid picture of the place where mouse breeding takes place?

That was kind of my idea from the outset; I wanted to find some stories of scientists working with different kinds of animals — mice and not — and I also wanted to go into the mouse factory. I was just fascinated by this idea that these are called breeders, but they function like factories; they’re producing animals that are each genetically identical to the others, so they’re like widgets off an assembly line. I just wanted to see what these factories looked like. I used to do some animal research and I’ve seen animal rooms at university labs, but I wanted to see what industrial lab animal breeding looked like.

You spent a lot of time traveling for this piece, reporting at breeding and distribution facilities and at university research labs. Did you start writing as you were reporting, or did you do all your reporting and then sit down to write?

I did all of my reporting and then sat down to write. This was something different than I did in 2009. I’m an amateur at doing these long projects because most of what we do at Slate is shorter pieces. So in 2009, I had taken a giant mountain of notes, and I went through and highlighted the key things from this giant stack of printouts, using different highlighters, then recombined them according to what could be part of what section. For this go-round, I printed out all my notes, but I avoided reading them through, for a very specific reason. The first time I went through this, I was kind of in awe of and in love with the amount of work that I’d put into the reporting. I’d go through my notes and go, “Oh yeah, this little detail! That has to go in Part Four!”

By not doing that this time, but instead just having my stack of notes next to me like a security blanket and then coming up with my outline, I think I gravitated toward what was most important. I think it’s really useful to try to set up the structure of the piece before you start digging through your notes, because otherwise you’ll find too many little chunks that you just kind of like — and then that ends up determining the structure, instead of what would be more natural as a structure.

What was your process for putting the story together? Do you use outlines?

In the past I’ve made outlines in Word or with pen and paper. This time I did something I liked that I’d never done before: I made up an Excel spreadsheet, changed the dimensions of the cells so they were big rectangles, able to have something like 10 lines of text apiece. Then I started plugging in paragraphs of ideas into these boxes. I liked doing it that way because it was more spatial, and with control-X and control-V I could just move an idea around on the page like big puzzle pieces. So I had sections of the piece running from left to right in my spreadsheet, with the progression of each piece running vertically. I had one of these for each piece in the series. That helped me a lot, and I changed the structure of this piece more than I have on any other I’ve worked on, I think in part because I was using this spreadsheet.

The other thing I tried very briefly, and am interested in trying more, was kind of a cure for writer’s block, especially for writing those historical sections: switching the font color to white. It’s like you’re typing in invisible ink. I tried it as a way to force myself to move forward because I’m one of those writers who tends to backtrack and self-edit as I go, in a counterproductive way. This was me trying to force myself to be the other kind of writer, who just throws everything on the page and sorts it out later.

Were there any pieces you really liked that ended up on the cutting room floor?

I had this whole thing I was working on about how it was that guinea pigs came to be the animal that in common speech we think of as the standard lab animal; but it’s not the case. Guinea pigs have been out of favor for decades, and I talked to this guy who is one of the last people to do research on tuberculosis using guinea pigs. He’s a great character and a great guy, and he describes himself as sort of an antiquarian. There was a point at the end where I thought I was going to include him — I thought the third section was going to be about naked mole rats and guinea pigs, and there was going to be a whole part of it about scientists who leave their lab spaces and go off into the wild to collect animals. There’s a great tradition of doing that, and I found a bunch of scientists who’ve done that. I had this elaborate outline, but I just realized as I was sitting down to write it that it would be much more effective to just pick one thing — I chose the naked mole rat because they’re so charismatic and because they’re kind of like the anti-mouse in a lot of ways — and just tell that story and let it stand in for all this other stuff. For someone who likes to go on and on and gets excited about all these little details, it was something I had to come to terms with, to pick just one tiny part and try to do it neatly in one piece. Maybe that’s why I’m so excited to talk about it now.

A glimpse behind the scenes:

• Spreadsheet outline
• Part I opening section: Draft comparison

Writing a good pitch is really tough. Writing a bad one is easy. Editors see the same mistakes over and over again, even from good writers. A few weeks ago, seven editors from a variety of publications participated in a round-table discussion, in a series of group emails, about how NOT to pitch. I started the conversation off with questions, and then we talked among ourselves about our horror stories, pet peeves, and practical advice. Think of The Open Notebook’s Pitch Database as a lesson in how to make editors say “yes.” Below, dear writers, is how to inadvertently make us say “no.”

Editors participating in the discussion were:

David Corcoran, New York Times
Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic News
David Grimm, ScienceNOW
Meg Guroff, AARP The Magazine
Laura Helmuth, Smithsonian
Robin Lloyd, Scientific American Online
Adam Rogers, Wired

*

Laura: Let’s start with one logistical question: email or phone?

Robin: Email pitches please.

Christine: Yes, definitely email pitches.

Meg: Email by a mile. The phone is intrusive. Email lets me see how you write; lets me forward your pitch to colleagues for consideration; and lets me ask follow-up questions or send a quick “no thanks” without getting dragged into a 20-minute conversation.

Adam: Glad to see I’m not alone in preferring emailed pitches… and then emailed again, because I will admit to being the kind of editor who probably needs a prod to respond. Email is great for time-shifting, obviously; but the risk to the writer, especially one whom I don’t know, is that unless the idea is a killer the email could fall below my horizon. And in truth, I often prefer a little preview-teaser email with just the logline of the idea, allowing me to say, “sure, tell me more,” instead of the full pitch. It’s weird how off-putting I have come to find the experience of clicking open an email only to have to wade through a two-graf anecdotal lede I’m not sure I’m going to care about. The best sales pitches, I think, start with a personal connection — and an opportunity for me to tell a writer, “Nope, I’m the wrong editor for this, you should email TK.”

David G: Calling is a definite no-no in my book.  I find it very unprofessional, and I especially hate when press officers do it (which is becoming a more common occurrence).

David C: Agreed on e-mail pitching. I don’t like cold calls and I respond to them coldly. Freelancers seem to have gotten the message, because I get very few phone queries these days (and several a day by e-mail). PR pitches are another matter, but let’s not talk about them.

Laura: What’s the most common mistake you see in pitches?

Robin: Most common mistake — pitching a topic, rather than a story.

Christine: The most common mistake I see is freelancers who don’t do their homework and read our website first. I.e., the majority of new pitches we get are for 10,000-word feature stories, like you’d see in National Geographic magazine, whereas we publish mostly 600-word-or-so news stories.

Meg: I’ll agree with Christine that a lack of familiarity with the publication is the most common. Another is presenting a story as something you’re dying to write, rather than as something our reader would be dying to read. Successful pitchers don’t lead with their own desires or credentials. Instead, they focus on what’s amazing about a story and how the story would fit into what the publication is trying to do.

Adam: The most common mistake I see is a lack of familiarity with the magazine — pitches that are aimed as web articles, pitches on subjects we’ve covered (that don’t advance the story), pitches for stories in a format or with an approach that Wired would never do. As an editor, I only want to feel loved, like the writer knows my true soul. Otherwise: no relationship.

David G: — Not knowing the outlet (i.e. pitching us technology stories, which we almost never cover)

— Just forwarding a press release

— Pitching the same stories everyone else is pitching (i.e. Science, Nature, etc)

— Pitching after the embargo has lifted

David C: The single most annoying thing I see in first-time pitches is a lack of awareness of context. Why is this story suitable for the Times? What, if anything, have we said about it before? What makes it new? Why should a reader care about it now? This is basic homework every writer should do; if I don’t see it, I’m most unlikely to read on.

(I do try to respond to all e-mails that were individually sent to me.)

Adam: Ooh, can I add one more tiny pet peeve? When a pitch consists solely of a writer saying, “Hey, did you see this? Might be worth a piece.” And then copies in a URL.

That is…not helpful to me. And it happens a lot.

Laura: It’s nice to see that many of these mistakes are universal — and so easy to avoid. Writers, use the search box. I often get pitches for stories we ran a few months earlier. Especially if it’s a story that’s been around a while, writers shouldn’t assume they’re the first ones to tell us about it. If they have some fresh angle, that’s fine — but they have to spell out why their story is different.

David C, one of the mistakes I often see — and I bet everyone else does, too — is a writer pitching a story from Tuesday’s Science Times. I tend to get these pitches on Thursday.  Do they think I don’t read the NYT?  Or that I forgot the story within two days?

Adam, I love the relationship image.  We want to be taken seriously, loved for who we really are!

As for how to tell a story from a subject, I hope any journalism professors out there invest some more time in teaching this distinction.  Better to learn from a classroom, workshop, conference or TON website than to learn from years of failed pitches.

Laura: If you’re comfortable revealing this, do you keep a black list?  If so, what sort of pitch-related behavior does it take to get on that list?

David G: I only put people on the black list after they write for me, usually because they either plagiarized or because their writing/reporting/attitude was so horrendous that I never wanted to work with them again.

Robin: It’s not pitches that induce aversion to a writer; it’s the quality of their writing and rewriting afterward, for me. Some writers send extremely weak pitches such as Adam described, but I’m still willing to work with the writer on those pitches at times, because I know they will do a good job in focusing/finding the story, and in writing and rewriting.

Meg: As for blacklists, there are a few writers whose tone-deaf pitching behavior demonstrates that I can’t rely on them to represent me or the magazine appropriately. I had one writer pitching me periodically for years on the idea of profiling a particular 1970s rocker of whom she was enamored. No matter how frequently, gently, or baldly I declined this proposal — at first on the merits, and then because she was clearly not objective on the subject — it kept coming back, to the point where I was morbidly delighted to see it in my in-box. But of course I couldn’t assign that story to her, or anything else for that matter. I just didn’t trust her judgment.

Adam: You guys have better blacklist stories than I do. I can’t think of a writer I’ve decided never to work with based on pitches alone. It’s always a function of what comes after the pitch — how good the work is, how easy the writer is to work with. I think I have a complicated cost-benefit algorithm involving the time it takes to produce a story versus the quality of the story, the quality of reporting versus the quality of writing versus the willingness to be edited, the quality of ideas (and their timeliness) versus the ability to execute them…I don’t know. When they replace us all with AIs the EditBot 6000 will be able to articulate all that much better. (But will it dream?)

Repeated mistakes, too, are a good way onto my blacklist. Rudeness or lack of cooperation with fact checkers gets a yellow card and then a red card if repeated.

Meg: I’ve used writers whose pitches demonstrated they would not be able to pull off the story without a lot of help…but it had to be a truly brilliant, original idea, or a story that only they could tell… doesn’t happen often. Right now, I’ve got one would-be personal essayist with an unusual story who kindly agreed to be written about instead of hired.

Laura: What’s the most horrible, ridiculous, epic-fail pitch you’ve ever gotten?

Laura: Mine involved one of the mistakes we covered already — forwarding a press release or news story — only the writer put a special twist on the mistake by not revealing that he was simply forwarding the guts of a newspaper story.  He made it look like his own deeply reported pitch.  The pitch was about animal cognition and it listed several then-recent examples of surprisingly smart behavior.  You’ve probably heard of most of these studies — sheep that recognize individual faces, jays that stash food in different places depending on which other birds are watching, a New Caledonian “cow” named Betty that could bend a wire into a hook to extract food from a bottle.

Not knowing that the writer was merely forwarding a story from the Guardian, I asked some follow-up questions. I mentioned that I assumed he’d just mistyped the cow business and knew, of course, that it was a “crow” named Betty.

Next mistake: he didn’t believe me.  No, he said, his “source” confirmed that it was a cow. That’s when I did a search and found the Guardian story and figured out that he’d plagiarized the whole pitch.

He was right, though: his source did confirm that it was a cow.  On second reference, the story referred to her as a “bovine” that could bend wire into a hook—another reason publications should have editors with at least a smidge of science knowledge.

David C: Wow … I can’t top that, and can’t really think of the pitch from hell. I get a lot of mediocre pitches but nothing dramatically, howlingly awful. There was the correction from hell, which resulted from a freelancer’s completely misunderstanding government data and confusing reported problems with actual injuries — a distinction the writer seemed incapable of grasping even after his sources explained to him that he’d gotten it wrong. This required me to write a whole new corrective article for the next week’s section. Needless to say, he has never written for us again on anything remotely involving interpretation of data.

David G: As far as worst pitch, that would have to be a freelancer who pitched me a couple of years ago about an AIDS study.  It was a very controversial study, promoting (if I remember correctly) an unusual therapy.  Fortunately, I passed the pitch by our AIDS expert, Jon Cohen, who did some digging and found out that the freelancer’s mother-in-law was an author on the paper.  I confronted the writer about this, and he told me it wasn’t a conflict of interest because he could be objective about the study.  As we were going back and forth I noticed something else troubling: The freelancer himself was mentioned in the paper’s acknowledgments.  When I brought that up, I didn’t hear from him again.

Top that!  :-)

Robin: I can’t remember an epic fail pitch, but almost every pitch I get is fundamentally flawed — overly topic-driven (not a story), not tailored to our publication(s), full of structural problems, too long, too short, too publicity-driven, or has factual errors in it. So I’m starting to rethink pitching and consider adopting these positions: a) pitching well is very hard to do, especially to multiple publications with their diverse audiences, tones and themes, and b) it is my job to work with writers who pitch to me to see if there is a good story in there for SciAm and to help guide them/us to it.

Meg: Ha, I defer to the son-in-law and the wire-bending cow. Most of my favorite horrid queries never get anywhere close to acceptance — they tend to involve writers going on for pages about themselves before mentioning a story idea. Once in a while I’ll get a pitch from someone who wants to profile a celebrity, but wants my assurance that we’ll take the story before even
approaching the celebrity to request an interview! As if the mere fact that this person had heard of the celebrity were enough to merit an assignment.

Adam: Worst pitch ever: I don’t remember. I mean, the really bad pitches are easy. You just politely say no, and you never speak of them again. And the really great pitches are easy: You say, “Writer, here is money to do the thing you say you can do for me. Please don’t suck.”

The really hard ones are the pitches that almost get there. A pitch with a great idea embedded in really terrible writing just kills me. What do you do? Take a flyer on the writer? Make an inevitably ham-fisted attempt to buy the idea but assign it to someone else? No good options there. A well-written pitch about something that isn’t right for Wired, or that we already did, often earns a “no, but please pitch again.” A great idea in a pitch that won’t get past our meeting process engages me — I work hard to develop pitches before my colleagues ever get a chance to evaluate them.

Meg: On a seasonal note, does anyone here respond favorably to Christmas cards from writers they’ve never hired? I’m on several of these lists and I think it makes the writer seem sort of lonely and bad at prioritizing. It’s not a blacklisting offense, but not something that makes me want to hire the person, either.

Christine: To answer Laura’s question, I don’t keep a black list. I can’t think of an epic-fail pitch, though there has been epic-fail behavior. We had a writer a few years ago who would pitch us a story then obsessively follow up. For one, he’d call each of us not long after emailing the pitch (we all sit in the same room, so each of our phones would ring in turn) and email us continually asking for an update. He became so annoying that eventually our managing editor had to remove him from our contributor roster. So I guess there is a limit to telling writers to be persistent!

I’ve never gotten a holiday card from a person we haven’t hired as a writer, though I think it’s nice to receive them from contributors. (That said, I think birth announcements, which we often get, are a bit weird!)

Laura: Christine’s anecdote about the writer who followed up obsessively immediately after sending in a pitch raises one question: How persistent is too persistent?

Laura: We occasionally have a writer pitch a story to one editor, get turned down, then send the identical pitch to a second editor, get turned down again, and pitch again.  That is too persistent. And a good way to get blacklisted — it’s sneaky, and this business requires a lot of trust.

I usually reply to pitches within a week and don’t mind getting a polite nudge if a week has gone by.  If it’s sooner than that, or not so polite, that’s too persistent.  (Exceptions for breaking news or a story with travel arrangements that need to be made immediately.)

Robin: Being reminded every two weeks on a pitch to which I’ve yet to respond doesn’t bother me. More frequently than that is a bit annoying but sometimes it works too — at least for writers with whom I regularly work and who I know could probably sell a story elsewhere if I don’t take it. I know they have to make sales, and that if I tarry, I am holding back their income and they are entitled to pitch elsewhere after some indeterminate amount of time. Relationships matter, again.

David G: I have a current freelancer, who, about two months ago began pitching three to four stories a day (I’m not making this up).  He’d send them in a batch, or — even more frustratingly — send them one after another as soon as I rejected the previous one.  I could tell from his pitch letters alone that he wasn’t a good writer, and his machine gun pitching was irritating the heck out of me.  But… he was finding some good stories.  So I let him keep pitching, and occasionally I took some of them.  But to cut down on the pitching, I told him he couldn’t pitch me more than one story a day.  I still cringe a bit when I see his name in my inbox, but at least it’s not as incessant as it was before.

Meg: It’s a good idea to ask the editor when you should check back. Depending on the publication you’re pitching, the proper interval could be daily, weekly, monthly… I appreciate a polite pester in the time frame I’ve suggested — it shows me the writer is eager and can follow directions.

Christine: I’d say anything beyond an email a week (unless, as Laura says, there’s a time-sensitive element) is too much. Also, phone calls are not really preferred — it’s better to respond to the person after I’ve had a chance to run the idea past the other editors.

Adam: On persistence, I’m reminded of something Atlantic editor James Gibney said at a panel I was moderating: “There is a special place in hell for editors who don’t call people back, and I am going there.” I would say, if I haven’t responded to your email in five working days, you should email me again and ask what’s what. I will then make some kind of pathetic apology and dedicate some time to what you’re pitching.

David C: I don’t fault persistence, even to the border of rudeness; these writers are trying to make a living, whereas I have a relatively secure job. But as noted before, a writer who is clueless about our needs is unlikely to have the wherewithal to write a decent story for us.

Laura: Does bad pitch hygiene get in the way of your relationships with freelancers?

Laura:  I mean relatively trivial things like someone not changing the subject line when they send a new pitch.  Or answering a question but not appending the earlier email exchange, so I can’t tell what the original question was.  Or copying and pasting a pitch to some other magazine without changing the name of the magazine.  (I get pitches all the time for stories that would be “a perfect fit for National Geographic.”)

Adam: “Pitch hygiene” is a great term for something that I’ve never been able to name. Like, I know I probably should just let it go when writers think they’re being helpful when they embed a ton of links in a pitch (even though my build of Entourage unembeds them and leaves me with a document shot through with full-sized URLs, rendering it unreadable). I know I shouldn’t hold it against them when a pitch shows up in three different font sizes, five different fonts, and a lot of boldface. And I know that it’s an honest mistake when someone gets my name wrong, or the section I edit, or the name of my magazine.

But I’m going to come clean: This stuff makes me nuts. I am begging of you, dear writers: Make it easy for me to read your pitch. Let me introduce you to my friend, Plaintext. I think you would like each other.

Hey, that sending-pitches-to-multiple-editors thing is hilarious, huh? Six of our assigning editors sit within 30 feet of each other, with no walls between us. That double- (or triple- or quadruple-) teaming thing is something we notice, and are not kind to.

Robin: Thumbs up on pitch hygiene. It slows me down particularly when earlier exchanges regarding a pitch aren’t appended. Then I have to go find the old email, and guess what… I won’t. It’s close to a kiss of death to your pitch. I have so many stories in my brain buffer daily — it’s not that easy for me to remember your pitch/email from a few days ago without context.

Meg: Don’t title your email “From [Your Name Here].” It indicates that you may be an idiot — all email programs tell you who the emails are from. I agree that links aren’t great, but they’re better than scads of attachments. I’ve had people send clips as PDFs, one PDF file per page. If you can’t master this sort of thing, get your parents or children to help you.

David C: Thanks, all. I can’t really add to those good thoughts, except to say multiple pitches are especially annoying — especially three or four in the same e-mail, or the same week- or two-week period.

Christine: I’d say not really that much if the person has already proved herself/himself as a solid writer/reporter. I also tend to give people the benefit of the doubt at least once, probably because I’ve made similar mistakes myself as a freelancer!

Adam: I do agree that I don’t need to see a flurry of PDFs. When I’m ready to look at clips, I’ll ask for them. Odds are if I’m thinking of working with a writer I’m going to Google him or her myself and root around, anyway.

Laura:  Do you have any advice for good writers (not the ones who misspell your name or pitch subjects rather than stories) about how they can make their pitches clearer, stronger, more efficient?

Robin: For writers with whom I have a relationship, sometimes they figure that means they can send short, two-sentence pitches all the time. I’d still prefer a longer pitch of three or so brief paragraphs. Some pitches go on for four or five lengthy paragraphs, or longer — that is too long for my purposes.

David G: Final advice:

— Always write “pitch” or “query” in the subject line, so I know it’s not a press release (and so I don’t automatically delete it).

— If you’re not sure what to pitch, write me and ask me what sorts of stories I’m looking for.

— Don’t pitch the big stories from Science and Nature.  That’s what everyone else pitches.  Find me the cool, under-the-radar stories that will become exclusives.

— Since you’re pitching me a web story, always mention if there’s multimedia.  Sometimes that can put a mediocre story over the top.

Robin: Oh yes. I want to underscore these points of David’s:

— write “pitch” in subject line please
— don’t pitch from Science, Nature, PLoS or PNAS — I’ve got those covered
— if you’re not sure what to pitch, email me and I will send back a standard “what I seek” email that I have prepared for such purposes.

Meg: Advice for good writers: Trust your story. Don’t start your pitch with who you are or who we know in common. Grab me with a lead-in that shows what a fantastic idea you’ve got and what a fantastic writer you are. Then you can briefly state the qualifications that make you perfect for the assignment, including anyone I know who can vouch for you, if there’s anyone.

Don’t offer to provide photographs unless they are rare historical images. We’re a glossy magazine that works with top photographers, and unless you regularly shoot for National Geographic, your photos are not going to cut it. The offer makes you look like you don’t understand what we’re doing.

Be nice. Life is short and editors are human beings. I would much rather work harder to coach someone who is open-minded and pleasant than invite a known jerk into my life, no matter what their copy looks like.

Christine: In our writing guidelines, we ask freelancers to send us a potential headline and 135-character summary along with their pitch. This helps zero in on the news quickly, especially if their pitch is rambling or unclear.

Echoing my first comment in this thread, I can’t stress enough that the person shows some knowledge of the publication in their pitch.  If they’re pitching a news story about a new species of Indonesian frog, mention that covered another species in the genus in March 2010 and this would be a great follow-up, etc.

Adam: Meg, I disagree with you about starting a pitch with a zinger of a lede. Even if it’s great, that’s two paragraphs I have to slog through before I know what the story is about — assuming it’s a magazine-y anecdotal thing. I’d much rather my first round with writers — whether I know them or not — be less formal to start, on the order of, “Hey, I have a story about TK; it’s important for these reasons… would you maybe be interested?” I may be wrong about this, but I also prefer that kind of informal exchange as a way to assess writing skills. It’s all an audition, right?

Advice for good pitches? Don’t write a pitch longer than the story you’d be assigned. Our front-of-book section stories rarely go longer than 300 words. Know what section you’re pitching, and maybe even what kind of item. Start essay? Prototype? Feature? Using the terminology of my magazine has the double benefit of making my life easier by saving me from having to think about something, and also proving that you know whom you’re pitching. Be clear and concise — there’ll be time for stylistic shenanigans later.

Now, TON has some questions for our readers: Editors, what pitching errors make you cringe? Writers, come clean: What rookie mistakes did you once make — and what did you later find to work better?

Guest Contributor Laura Helmuth is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine, where she handles most of the magazine’s science, nature, technology, and environmental coverage. She was previously a writer and editor at Science magazine, and she has written for Science News, National Wildlife, and California Wild. She is a member of The Open Notebook’s advisory board.

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(Photo at top: “Mark Buehrle Pitching” by akrobat77, via Flickr)

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Welcome back for another installment of  Ask TON. (Wondering what Ask TON is? See here for background information and our introductory post. Click on “Ask TON” above to see previous installments.)

Today’s question:

Should anonymous (unattributed) quotes be used to develop stories which would not be possible without them — such as when individuals are unwilling to go on the record with negative comments?

We put this question to several of our colleagues. Here’s what they shared:

Alexandra Witze, a contributing editor to Science News:

Anonymous sources need to be treated with care and used extremely rarely, but there should be no unilateral rule against citing them. Reporters should always press their sources to be on the record, over the course of multiple interviews if necessary. And it’s very important to understand and independently confirm, if possible, the request for anonymity. Does the source, for instance, really have a substantial reason for making this negative comment, or does he or she just have an axe to grind with someone else in the story? As an editor I rarely permitted anonymous sources — only if, for instance, we had confirmed that the source was indeed at risk of losing his or her job, or would suffer other severe consequences as a result of speaking out. The bar must be set very high.

Mark Peplow, news editor at Nature:

Yes, but you must explain in the story why the source is anonymous. Unless there are some exceptional and explainable circumstances preventing it,  the fact(s) should be second-sourced.

John Travis, deputy news editor at Science:

Since I work in Washington, D.C. where political coverage is rife with anonymous sources, I can see both the danger and appeal of citing these sources. A reporter should seek to avoid them at all costs because they can weaken the story in the eyes of the reader, but I would never go so far as to ban them from a publication — sometimes, they are an absolute necessity in reporting known information. Ultimately, the goal of a journalist is to impart crucial or interesting knowledge to an audience; if doing that is only possible with anonymous sources, then so be it. In the end, it’s up to the reader to judge the credibility of a story, author and his or her sources. However, a reporter risks his or her reputation if anonymous sources prove wrong (consider Judith Miller) — if one does resort to anonymous sources, they should be identified as much as possible to note any potential biases.

What are your views on handling anonymity? Share them in the comments.

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(Photo at top: “Anonymity, Plate 11” by Thomas Hawk, via Flickr)

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In June 2010, Michael Finkel needed a new idea. The Bozeman-based author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa and writer for GQ, National Geographic, and Men’s Journal wasn’t satisfied with the stack of print-outs in the two-inch deep brownie pan on his desk. And none of the hundreds of ideas in a Word document on his computer struck his fancy. So, he opened up his web browser and typed a query into Google: “Amazing human feats.” That nebulous search brought him to a YouTube video of a blind man careening down a trail on a mountain bike, and by the end of the day he had a killer one-paragraph pitch for Men’s Journal: The Incredible (Yet True) Way That (A Few) Blind People Can “See”: Echolocation. [editors' note: Find Finkel's pitch at The Open Notebook's pitch database.]

There are whole books on interviewing, and whole books on structure, but finding ideas remains one of the most mysterious and frustrating parts of journalism. “Nobody teaches you how to come up with ideas,” Finkel says. “It’s alchemy.” As a freelancer, I find that there are few things worse than running out of ideas and becoming paralyzed in front of the computer, wondering what I am supposed to write about next. It’s not writer’s block, exactly. If I had the idea, I could start the research, and if I could start the research, then I could start the writing. It’s that old catch-22: I don’t want to invest time researching a topic that may not turn into a sellable story, but if I’m not researching that topic, I’ll never find that story.

If ideas are essentially information without context then the skill of the feature writer is to recognize their significance, pluck them out of the data stream, and put them to good use. Sometimes the tidbit you stumble upon leads you down an investigative rabbit hole. Other times, you may already have an intriguing story topic, but you’ve never been able to crack it because you’re missing that nugget that turns an academic idea into a riveting narrative. I know how I fumble in the dark for inspiration, but I imagined that some writers out there might be a little more professional about things: What tricks do they have to keep the momentum up, and what do they do when the well runs dry? How do they recognize a good idea when they see it?

Perhaps it makes sense to start with Jonah Lehrer, a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Lehrer is just about the most ideas-oriented journalist you can imagine. His beat is mostly neuroscience, his website organizes his clips under the rubric of “ideas,” and, after the publication of his second book, How We Decide, he became a sought-after speaker delivering 30 to 40 lectures a year. He’s a thinker, but he certainly doesn’t spend his days staring at the wall. “Even the very idea-centered pieces begin with this social spark,” he says. As he discovered reporting “The Eureka Hunt” for The New Yorker, people who have eureka moments don’t have higher IQ scores, but they tend to have widespread social networks and lots of acquaintances. A dinner in Toronto led him to the man who cracked the lottery, while a conversation with a scientist for another story put him on the trail of The Decline Effect, a piece on scientific results which don’t seem to stick.

In February 2009, Lehrer was backstage at a conference in Boston preparing to give a talk when he struck up a conversation with another speaker. Lehrer asked the man what he did for a living. “Oh, I work in floor cleaning,” the man replied. “Oh my God, this is the most boring conversation,” Lehrer thought. “How did I get here? What am I doing?” He was calculating how he could pry himself away from the tedium when something remarkable happened—the man began to talk about how he invented the Swiffer^TM to replace the mop. Bingo! That quirky and unexpected tale opens Lehrer’s upcoming book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, which will be published in March 2012.

Many writers I spoke to agree with Lehrer that cultivating a wide social network is key, but they also maintain a diverse media diet. Finkel is partial to New Scientist and Science News for research briefs that hold feature potential at a general interest magazine. Elizabeth Svoboda, a contributing writer at Fast Company and a contributing editor at Popular Science, periodically checks in at Eurekalert for news ideas, but she finds that feature ideas come from reading broadly and getting a handle on the larger questions in a scientific field. She collects ideas in Firefox folders arranged by potential outlet and then she checks back on when she has time to pitch. One of her favorite sources for profile subjects is university research magazines at the University Research Magazine Association. “Sometimes it seems the harder I look for ideas, the more they squirm away from me,” she says. It’s true that it’s often easier to find a new idea when you’re out reporting on another story: Svoboda learned about a Florida cardiologist sending patients abroad for stem cell treatments—which she later wrote about for Popular Science—when she was working on a long news piece on stem cell tourism for Fast Company.

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a staff writer at Science and a contributor to Wired, Discover, The Atlantic, and other magazines, regularly reads science journals and press releases as part of his day job, but he also looks at Indian newspapers and regional newspapers in the U.S. to find stories that haven’t broken out nationally or may have an untapped science angle. That’s how he kept track of the organ trade in India, and learned about a self-taught surgeon who ran a kidney trafficking ring. Since he’s a generalist, he finds it hard to keep in touch with old sources, but if he writes a story he thinks they may be interested in, he’ll send them a link and a quick hello. “That has led to some of the most privileged information coming to me,” he says.

Of course, recognizing a good idea — no matter where it comes from — can also be a challenge. “I feel like knowledge and ideas are sometimes in conflict,” Bhattacharjee says. “If you don’t know anything, you are more receptive to ideas.” One day he was flipping through a 2008 report on organized crime from the Department of Justice when he noticed that the U.S. was cooperating with European law enforcement to battle cyber crime. He called up a few people on background and the town of Râmicu, Romania popped up in an interview. It’s the kind of detail that might slip past a beat reporter looking for the big picture. But for Bhattacharjee it was the first step to a Wired feature in February 2011: How a remote town in Romania has become cybercrime central.

Finally, writing can be a personal endeavor and some of the best ideas just come from looking inside yourself. “This is kind of embarrassing,” Svoboda says before launching into a tale of self-discovery. During American history class in high school in California, she coughed up a pea-sized white chunk into her hand. “Is this a piece of tumor?” she wondered. She was frightened and horrified, but forgot about the incident for many years. Until it happened again. She hunted for information on the web, but never found anything. “I came to the conclusion that I was the only one with this problem,” she says. Then, one day, she discovered that the harmless condition had a name — tonsil stones — and there were entire forums on the topic. She decided that if it was so hard for her — a science writer — to get the straight story on tonsil stones, it had to be worth writing about. [editors' note: read Svoboda's pitch here.] The New York Times agreed.

Guest Contributor Brendan Borrell has written about science, crime, and natural resources for Bloomberg Businessweek, Nature, Scientific American, Slate, Smithsonian, and many other outlets. Follow Brendan on Twitter @bborrell.

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(Photo at top: Untitled, by BikoBikoBiko, via Flickr)

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Whether you rely on a digital recorder or a laptop or a ragtag collection of mismatched notebooks, you need to take good notes. That doesn’t just mean that your handwriting needs to be legible — though that matters too. It means that your notes capture the essence of what you have observed, from the words your sources uttered to — in some situations — the direction the wind was blowing as you spoke. Every situation calls for different note-taking strategies, and every writer has his or her own preferences. Recently, Science’s Online News Editor David Grimm offered us a trove of advice on note-taking, which he assembled for students at Johns Hopkins University’s science writing master’s program, where he is on the faculty. Grimm polled colleagues about the best way to take notes during interviews. Here’s their advice:

Prepping for the Interview

• Plan of attack: Go to an interview with a plan and an expectation of what the interviewee is going to say.  If the person says something surprising, write that down. If a person has a great quote or turn of phrase, write that down. Though you may not be writing much, keep your pen moving by writing down points you expected the person to make ‑‑ that way you can guide your interviewee to make sure he/she actually makes the points you need for your story, and you don’t wonder later, “Am I making this up or did the person actually say something like this?” Continually writing also helps your interviewee think you’re interested in most of what he/she is saying, so the interviewee might give you something that he/she might not give to other interviewers. (Robert Frederick) /Whichever medium I’m working in, I go over my notes right after the interview, fill in blanks from short-term memory, and clean up any mistakes or illegible patches. (Robert Coontz)
• Questions: I always draw up a complete list of questions before an interview and then put the list aside. I don’t consult it at all during the interview, concentrating instead on keeping the conversation flowing and following up right away on points I don’t understand or need more info on. Then at the end,  I pull out my notebook and quickly scan the list to see that I’ve covered everything I needed to, and if necessary ask any remaining questions. Usually though I’ve covered all the points, and often gotten far more than anticipated from a source. (Heather Pringle)

How to Take Faster Notes

• Shorthand: The only reliable method I think is shorthand. I don’t know shorthand, so in this situation I try to filter info as I’m putting pen to paper — jotting down sure-bet quotes, key data, etc. it’s hard to keep that up. Sometimes I drift into a robotic trance where I’m trying to jot down every word. (Richard Stone)
• Speedwriting: We discuss interviewing a lot in my class. I advise them to start learning Speedwriting as soon as possible (a more user-friendly version of shorthand which can be used right away, while you’re still learning). Amazon has various courses available: Speedwriting for Notetaking and Study Skills and Speedwriting Skills Training Course. (Michael Balter)
• Drop vowels: I drp vwls. (Jon Cohen)
• Make up your own shorthand: I use my own invented speedwriting. My abbreviations change a lot from interview to interview — a capital C might stand for crocodile if I’m doing a story on crocodiles, or might stand for chromosome if I’m doing a story on genetics. I’ll actually try to jot down a few abbreviations before I start an interview, with words I think will be common in the conversation. That keeps me from getting distracted later in the interview thinking about what to abbreviate. I think my biggest stride in note taking came when I realized I didn’t have to get every word of the entire interview written down exactly verbatim, just the parts I might want to quote (as a beginning writer I recorded every interview, made a full word-for-word transcript of the entire interview, and then would look through it for quotes… sooo time-consuming, but I really thought that’s what was done). Maybe it’s because I got better at immediately recognizing when something is quotable — I’ll focus on getting that down right and not worry if I’m missing the exact wording of some less quotable material that comes after it. When someone is giving me general background information or explanation that I need to understand but probably won’t quote, my note-taking is more like it would be in a class — an outline form or general thoughts and ideas and how they connect. Depends how familiar I already am with the subject area though. (Sarah C.P. Williams)
• Software: When I am doing phone interviews, I record and type notes in PearNote. The text is tied to the audio, so I can click on a particular spot in the text and it will play the audio from that time point. The sound comes from my landline and goes into my computer through some weird RadioShack gadget. Also, I use a headset so that I can have both hands free to type. I think PearNote is only for Macs, but MS OneNote does the same thing.  When I am on the road, I scribble illegibly in a notebook and use a recorder. I try to remember to mark the time on the recorder if someone says something interesting. (Cassandra Willyard)
• Hardware: I’m no techno-geek, but I’d like to make a strong plug for Livescribe, a recording pen. Your written notes — page scans — are uploaded to computer and you can either play back the entire recording or jump around to where you’ve noted juicy quotes or key information. It’s the most valuable tool for my work since the Internet. (Richard Stone)
• Others: Particularly if you don’t have much advanced notice of an interview, and so cannot necessarily prepare and come to an understanding of what the interviewee is going to say, learn one of the alternative handwriting systems.  Here’s a site that discusses a lot of them: http://www.alysion.org/handy/althandwriting.htm. (Robert Frederick)
• Or… Write slow: I use notebook and pen and my own bastard shorthand. One of the benefits of this not very speedy technique is that it creates voids that the interviewee feels obliged to fill. If they finish what they were intending to say, and you don’t immediately come back with another question because you’re scrawling down their words, they’ll often just keep going and say things they might not have wanted to say or make off the cuff comments that provide good colour. Once you sit down to write and are reading through your notes, the most indispensible piece of technology is a highlighter pen. A splash of colour over the juiciest quotes makes them so much easier to find among pages of dross. (Dan Clery)

In the Field

• Listening/Seeing: Concentrate on listening; your notes are just going to be a reminder of what the person told you. You’re not going to get every word they say. So you have two goals: understand what they’re saying and get quotes. Oh, three goals: you also need color. For quotes, when someone says something you want to capture, stop listening and concentrate on repeating what they just said in your head until you have it down. Don’t forget the color. That’s the hardest part to get later on the phone. Then as soon as you are back at a computer, type up your notes. You’ll remember things you didn’t write down, and you’ll still be able to remember what your scrawls mean. (I can’t read my handwriting by day two.) With time and practice, you’ll start developing abbreviations that work for you. (Helen Fields) / One thing I want to add is that if you are writing a book or magazine article where you might want to describe a scene, make sure you take notes at the scene about how the place looks, smells, sounds, etc, and take photos or video (great for voices and catching a person’s cadence, etc.) that you can look at when you’re writing. Jot down apt analogies, etc. while the material is fresh. And always date the interviews/times in case you need to use the notes later. (Ann Gibbons) / I think it’s important to not just write up your notes from a lab or field visit within 24 hours, but to actually write scenes in at least as much detail as you’d use them in your article. My notes from the field tend to be a mix of scattershot details and quotes. When I actually start describing the scene, other details I hadn’t thought to note often seem necessary. If I do this within a day or so I can remember them. When I haven’t done it soon enough, I’ve regretted it. (Greg Miller)
• Photos and videos: I am loathe to rely on my notes when describing a scene in a story. I take loads of photos not only as potential illustrations but to better reconstruct scenes. I’ve also begun recording short videos for that purpose. (Richard Stone)
• Computers: I sometimes use a laptop during an interview in the field, especially if it’s in a setting where laptops are common. For example, at a scientific conference, if I go to a coffee shop with a research during a break, a laptop doesn’t create any distance between us. But if I’m in Nairobi visiting a woman in her wattle, the last thing I’d do is pull out an indiscreet chunk of high tech gear. One advantage to hand notes is I often draw something in the environment. This both helps me remember color and puts me back in that place. I also like to ask people to write their names for me, especially if they’re not used to being interviewed. It increases the likelihood that I will not misspell the person’s name, everyone’s handwriting has a beauty to it, and it creates an intimacy with the source, as though we’ve entered some sort of contract with each other that is binding. As far as electronic letdowns and glitches, handnotes have shortcomings, too. I once lost a notebook. It broke my heart. With electronic files, I can easily back them up, e-mailing them to the cloud. They also are much easier to work with when writing a story (though I typically type in all my handnotes for longer stories). I’ve played with several voice recognition programs. None are all the way there, but, interestingly, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and Adobe Soundbooth CS5 can do crude transcripts with time logs, which make it much easier to then search your digital recording/video clips. I think we one day will record everything and use these programs. (You can download the Adobe products for free trials and test drive.) (Jon Cohen)
• Good-old-fashioned notebooks: I scribble my notes in notebooks, too, and record if I absolutely must, since I truly hate transcribing. I also don’t like reading the pages & pages that come from a full transcription service. Like others, I’ve developed my own speedwriting system — and like someone mentioned adapt it to the story at hand. If I’m writing about Earth, I note it as E, for instance. I prefer notebooks (Rite-in-the-Rain pocket notebooks) for many reasons — they don’t run out of batteries; are pretty much indestructible (unless you lose them; I often “wear” my notebooks, keeping them in a special pouch around my neck or waist or daypack, and never ever put them in checked luggage); and it’s easy to flip through them at the end of the day, or even as an interview is in progress, to review where you are, and what else you need to know. Sometimes new questions arise from the interview itself. I also mark my notebook up with stars and underlines and highlights, and draw pictures, graphs, etc. You do develop a listening skill — you get that sense when a quote is just perfect. I find that I can mentally record those, and I do make sure I get those keepers down fast. (Virginia Morell)
• Drawings: I also often draw in my notebooks, and often ask scientists to draw for me ‑‑ they often think graphically or in diagrams, and this helps me to understand. (Elizabeth Culotta)

Other Interview Advice

• First statements: One thing I often do when starting an interview is to explain to the interviewee what sort of story I’m intending to write. This helps put them at their ease. (Dan Clery)
• First questions: My go-to in interviewing is asking people about how they came to do what they do. Most folks like to tell their origin story. (Gisela Telis)
• Act interested: And make sure you appear interested. You need to get them to trust you. (Dan Clery)
• Organize! I’ve become a big fan of Evernote, which is an app that lets you create notes and organize them into notebooks. It all gets synched to the cloud automatically and pushed out to your other devices, so any notes you take on your laptop are automatically updated on your desktop, iPhone, etc. It also lets you attach files (pdfs of papers, photos taken on a reporting trip, MP3s of recorded interviews) to particular notes. You can also add websites and emails to your notebooks. I really like it because I can keep all the various media related to a story in one place, and it’s all automatically backed up and synched across devices. (Greg Miller)

Do you have some sage advice of your own? Please add it in the comments!

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(Photo at top: “spiral bound” by Chris Blakeley, via Flickr)

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Deborah Blum

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deborah Blum’s five books have immersed her in the worlds of animal rights, the psychology of affection, the neurology of sex, the search for paranormal phenomena, and the chemistry of poisons. Her best-selling book The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, published in 2010, traces the origins of modern forensic medicine through the lives of two scientists as they navigate crime and chemistry in early 20th century New York.  Here, Blum talks with TON guest contributor Jyoti Madhusoodanan about the research that shaped the book and the importance of a writer’s perspective:

How did you come up with the idea for The Poisoner’s Handbook?

I was just looking for a way to write about chemistry! I love chemistry, it’s a beautiful science. We are a walking collection of chemicals. We drink and eat and swallow chemicals every day and most of them don’t harm or kill us; some are even useful. And also, I really like poisons. What was it about this small group of chemicals that were so uniquely destructive? But I was also thinking about how it would be fun to do this in a subversive way. What if I could tell a story about poisons like an early 20th century murder mystery?

How much of your research and structure was outlined in your proposal, before you started writing the book?

For my previous books I’d always written a firm proposal, in the 20 to 30 page range, defining the idea and structure of the book. With The Poisoner’s Handbook, I had just finished doing a narrative history — Ghost Hunters — and my agent suggested that I write a short proposal describing this poison idea I kept talking about. So I wrote a three-page proposal saying vaguely, “Poisons are really cool…can I write about them?” and it got accepted.

As always, I signed the contract and spent the advance. And then it really struck me: What in the world is this book about? For other more brilliant people than me this method might work really well, but I was panic-stricken. It would have been much better for me to have figured out the proposal before I was on the clock. But I have thought that I would never have found my two main characters, Alexander Gettler and Charles Norris, if I hadn’t been so desperate during my research later.

How did you come across these main characters?

I was reading everything I could find about poisons — journal articles, textbooks of the time, newspapers and magazines for murder cases. I was searching the archives of the newsletters of the American Society of Forensic Scientists when I first saw a reference to Alexander Gettler as “the father of American forensic toxicology.” And I was hoping to find a biography and couldn’t. He and Charles Norris were lost in footnotes, and no superficial or obvious search would’ve brought them up, because they just weren’t there.

Then, I also discovered the New York City municipal archives, where I found all the letters of the New York medical examiner’s office from the year Norris started until his death. Then I pulled archives from the New York City DA’s office from that same time period as well. I checked records at Bellevue, where their offices were initially; the New York City Historical Society; and the public library, to find newspapers that weren’t online — like, say, the Brooklyn Eagle of 1933. I used ProQuest historical newspapers a lot, which are fantastic because they archive online The New York Times back to the first edition, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times…and they’ve added more papers as well.

I also got a friend at a newspaper to help me find Gettler’s family. They got me a list of every single Paul Gettler in the New York area and I started calling them all, until I found the right Paul Gettler — it was very helpful in that case to have been a newspaper reporter…you’ve built a career annoying people so it doesn’t really bother you. The Gettler family was wonderful with providing personal reminiscences.

How did you focus your timeline?

I knew I was going to be zeroing in on Norris and Gettler for the main narrative arc of the story. I did a previous chapter on chloroform to set the scene of what it was like before they came into office. For the ending — Norris died in 1935 but Gettler died decades later and he’s the toxicologist — did I want to follow him for the rest of his career to the end?

That would’ve made an encyclopedia of poisons rather than a handbook, so I thought I’d end sometime around the time of Charles Norris’ death. I chose to end with the Fanny Creighton case — she’s an arsenic murderess who killed her brother in 1923, and then 12 years later she killed a boarder in her house. The first time she got away with it; the second time she didn’t and was executed. The first time Gettler was a witness for the defense; the second time he was a witness for the prosecution. So she raised all kinds of interesting issues, and she was executed the year after Norris’ death. That really focused all the points I wanted to make about everything that had happened during that time period — why they were able to build this excellent case against her later, which they couldn’t earlier. So I pushed the book just past Norris’ death to Fanny Creighton’s execution.

How central was the history itself in your research?

Once I’d established that time frame, I knew I wanted to give it that early-20th-century Agatha Christie-like feel. Even a “chemical” history is still a history set in a particular time period. Floating through my story were World War I, Prohibition, women getting the right to vote, and the whole anarchistic culture of the 20s, where everyone was violating the constitution simply by drinking, and the culture itself was just: “How much can I get away with?”

I did a lot of scene setting to provide a sense of these times, like the carbon monoxide chapter started with this description of this busy street in New York. But more than just setting scenes as backdrops, I think of the period itself as a character in my book, important for people to understand. For example, why do you have to mess around with 6,000 brains to figure out whether someone’s drunk at the time of death? And where are you getting these brains in a time that alcohol is illegal?

Why did you focus each chapter around a particular chemical, and how did you choose them?

I knew Norris and Gettler were a good story, but is “The History of the New York Medical Examiner’s office between 1918 and 1935” a story worth writing? It had to be more than just a single obvious historical narrative arc. I chose to combine these two lines of the story into a braided narrative of the chemistry and the lives of Norris and Gettler, to come up with the final structure. Part of the story is the history of the ME’s office, but it is also the story of poisons in those times, and how these two scientists tackled each one. I framed each period around one poison, and then re-organized my structure to say, “What’s the poison of 1922?” So that the book would be a story of poisons and the role they played in life then, but it also progresses through the lives of Norris and Gettler and what they accomplished.

How did you outline this narrative structure?

With this kind of braided structure, it is important to remember where the multiple strands of the story come together. For example, in the proposal for the book that I just did (which I’m being very cagey about because I just sent it to my agent) I worked out a very definitive structure involving three scientists in three different parts of the country. Though there are three narrative lines, they can’t be parallel. They have to intersect, physically and intellectually. When creating multiple plots, it’s all about where the strands intersect — where I bring them together or pull them apart, and where will I bring them back together? How long can I continue with one strand before people will lose track of the others?

For Poisoner’s Handbook, I didn’t have such a structured proposal to work with, but during my research I created what I think of as a “living outline.” I created the basic timeline and major arc of the story, so I knew where I was going to start and where I wanted to end, but with the clause, “This will work if I find a good story.”  My research had to follow that arc, but if something interesting popped during the research, I’d change the outline based on that.

So I started with a rough outline, and I moved poisons around as I found certain cases that took the story forward. As I continued with the research, I plugged them into my outline. For example, I found a great mercury case where this man is falsely accused of murdering his wife. So then the mercury chapter was structured around that. The other example that really stands out for me is of the government poisoning alcohol during Prohibition. I’d been reading all these histories of prohibition and never saw anything about it, but in searching the newspaper archives, I found several stories about it. It really changed the way I had planned to write about that period.

How did you keep track of this living outline?

During my research, I catalogued obsessively. I set up different files and organizational structures, and I used RefWorks for the standard citations, so I was keeping constant track of my sources. In addition to organizing by year, I organized by poison. Say, here’s every reference about arsenic and the major point it makes. At the same time, I did physical, old-fashioned filing — two cabinets’ worth. I printed out everything about arsenic in The New York Times from 1920 to 1935, and filed them chronologically as well. So I had parallel catalogs, by year and by poison — say, an “arsenic” folder organized chronologically, and an “all poisons in 1920” folder. This way, when I knew I was going to make 1920 my arsenic chapter, I could pull every newspaper story about it in 1920 from that one folder. I also did a kind of cross-referencing of my bibliography according to what chapter I thought the references would be in. Sometimes, in addition to these, I use tools like OmniOutliner to keep track of things.

Going back to your early career for a moment, what were some of the challenges with switching between reporting a news story and writing narrative non-fiction?

With newspaper writing I always thought about the start of the story: What’s my lede? And I knew I would wind up with some summary quote. When writing narrative, I tend to think about the end as much as the beginning, if not more. If I don’t have an ending, is it a story still? To me, a story is something in motion, a journey. I’m taking the reader on this journey with me — to where?

Thinking about the ending changed the way I did newspaper pieces also. For example, I wrote this story for the Sacramento Bee called “The Dark Side of Light,” about sisters who have no protection against UV light because of a mutation, so they can never go out during the day. So I kept the boundaries of my narrative to a single day: The sun goes up and they have to draw the curtains, the little girls can’t go outside, and in the end when the sun goes down, they can go out in the dark and play in their little wading pool in the backyard. That’s a classic narrative arc, where you know you’re going to start in the morning and end at night, and as this family moves through this one day, you’ll drop back in places and give the history and tell the story and talk to the experts about the disease and so on. But you are always thinking about how the scenes fit together, and how to eventually get back to that moment in the dark.

What was most challenging in moving from newspaper writing to narrative books?

The bigger challenge for me was learning to insert my voice and attitude in my writing. Subtly or not subtly, a book author’s thoughts and feelings about the subject infuse the work in a way that we don’t do as reporters. In newspaper journalism, you learn to stick to the facts, that you’re not part of the story. But there’s NO good book in which the author isn’t part of the story in some way or the other.

To give you an example of that, the first narrative book I did was Love at Goon Park where my main character, Harry Harlowe, changed the way we think about love and affection with his work. His message was that holding and comforting a child, a solid foundation of love matters in normal human development. So you’d want him to be this big cuddly teddy bear of a guy, and he wasn’t. He hardly hugged any of his kids, he cheated on his wife, was an alcoholic, philandering, chain-smoking, really difficult, complicated guy — a fascinating and great character. But the book is infused with warmth; it’s about love. And it’s my deep abiding affection for the notion that love matters that is the personality that infuses the book — not his.

Where is your voice in The Poisoner’s Handbook?

It is my perspective that makes this a true crime story about forgotten scientists. It’s not like there are no true crime stories, or stories about Norris and Gettler, but this poisoner’s journey through this period is my perspective on the facts. On the surface, it’s just two civil servants plodding in this ME’s office through the decades of their lives. But this particular narrative is shaped by my fascination with crime and chemistry.

I try to incorporate this perspective even on short pieces now, like blog posts. You can do narrative writing of many lengths — I do want to say that it doesn’t have to be this enormous process of me spending two years on multiple outlines. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be beautiful short writing.

A glimpse behind the scenes:

• Working guide to The Poisoner’s Handbook
• Ghost Hunters proposal
• Love at Goon Park edits

Jyoti Madhusoodanan

Guest Contributor Jyoti Madhusoodanan is a freelance science writer who has written for the DOE Joint Genome Institute, The Tech Museum at San Jose, and California magazine. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Follow Jyoti on Twitter @smjyoti.

Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot needs little introduction to most readers of The Open Notebook: Her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has been a bestseller since its publication in February 2010, and she has toured the U.S. and Europe almost constantly since then talking about the book and the many issues of race, science, and privacy it raises. She’s also been interviewed many times as well. Here she talks with TON guest contributor David Dobbs about two particularly writerly issues the book raises: structure, and the use of the writer as character:

You’ve been interviewed to death about this book, so I’ll limit this to two areas readers of The Open Notebook might be interested in: one is structure and the other is your decision to put yourself in the book and how you handled that.

That’s good. I honestly think that structure is one of the most important tools in writing, yet it’s not something that people often pick apart and really get obsessed with.

Did you carry your concern about structure into this project, or was it something you developed as you wrestled with it?

No, I came to the book already fixated on structure. I did my MFA in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, and Lee Gutkind, who was one of my professors there, taught a readings class where he constantly harped on structure. Every class, the first exercise we had to do with every piece we read was map out the structure. The first day of class we read an essay in class and his first question when we were done was, “What’s the structure of this

piece?” We had no idea what he meant. And he wouldn’t tell us. He would just push us and push us, and people would randomly guess things … They’d say, “It’s a profile.” He’d say, “No, that’s not a structure.”

Eventually it clicked for me when he walked me line-by-line through a piece he’d written and said, See how the piece starts here, then goes back in time here, then forward in time here, but always comes back to that same story I started with, which is actually in chronological order? The story was about a veterinarian facing tough decisions about whether to euthanize various animals; it did jump around in time a lot, and included sections of exposition, or facts — like the history of the field, or whatever — that weren’t part of the narrative, but when you pulled the essay apart it became clear that the structure was just a day in the life of this vet going from one patient to the next. From that point on, I started obsessively mapping out the structures of everything I read. When I started teaching I made my students do the same thing.

Any student who has ever studied with me would think, “Ugh. Structure, structure, structure; that’s all she talked about.” My philosophy is, once you understand what structure is, then you can talk about characters and narrative arcs and how to fill in the story. But for me, structure can just completely make or break something.

Skloot's first visit to Turner Station and the Henrietta Lacks Museum. Skloot says, "Courtney Speed in Turner Station was hoping to turn this building into a museum in Henrietta's honor; I took this photograph to document the building, its location relative to the sign welcoming people to Turner Station, etc. I then took at least a roll of photos (if not more) documenting every inch of the building that I thought might be relevant someday in the future for describing it." Photo courtesy of Rebecca Skloot.

What are some key teaching pieces you used?

I always use John McPhee’s “Travels in Georgia” because it’s such a brilliant structure. Once you figure it out, it’s so basic. But it’s really hard to see it at first. When you say to people, “Read this thing and tell me how it’s structured,” they just can’t. But once you really pick it apart you see he starts in the middle of the story, then he goes forward for a while, then loops back around so by the middle of the piece you’re back at the point where you started, then you continue forward. He’s so subtle and graceful with the structure that few readers even realize they’ve looped back around to the point where the story started because he doesn’t hit you over the head with it. He calls it the lowercase e structure, and once you learn to recognize it you see it everywhere — in so many great stories, books, movies.

Are there other writers or books who have been particular models for you, structure-wise?

When I was working on my book, I knew very early on that I wanted it to be a disjointed structure that told multiple stories at once and jumped around in time between different characters. If you learn the story of the HeLa cells by itself, it’s a very different story than if you learn it alongside the story of what happened to Henrietta and her family as a result of those cells. Each story takes on a different weight when you learn them at the same time.

Plus, if I had just told the story from the beginning — “Henrietta Lacks was born … blah, blah, blah”– nobody would have known why they should care who Henrietta was. Then Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter, would have appeared about halfway through the book and the focus of the story would have suddenly shifted completely to her, since she’s really the main character of the book in many ways. Then a few hundred pages later I would have appeared as a character out of nowhere. It would have all been very disjointed and disorienting and wouldn’t have worked.

The other thing I knew was that I wanted my book to read like a novel but be entirely true. That to me is the definition of Creative Nonfiction. So instead of reading nonfiction books as models, I turned to fiction. As soon as I realized I had to structure the book in a disjointed way, I went to a local bookseller, explained the story to her and said, Find me any novel you can find that takes place in multiple time periods, with multiple characters and voices, and jumps around a lot. So she did. Some of the most helpful books early on for me were Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, by Fannie Flagg; Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich; As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner; Home at the End of the World and The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. I read a long list of similarly structured novels that all proved helpful in some way or another: The Grass Dancer, by Susan Power; How to Make an American Quilt, by Whitney Otto; Oral History, by Lee Smith. I also read a lot of important African American authors to immerse myself in their voices, cultures, history: Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Alex Haley, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Albert French … it’s a long list.

In a way you have to claim the right to do certain things fairly early in a book, or you can’t do it. In this case you had to claim the right to go backward and forward in time. You wait a while to get you in there — you don’t appear until page 67. But that’s early enough.

Right. This relates to the famous line from Checkov: “If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” You need to set the reader up early for the story that follows while not introducing extraneous stuff that isn’t related to the plot.

In this case, since I knew the book was going to be a braid of three narratives (the story of me and Deborah; the story of Henrietta and the cells; and the story of Henrietta’s family), I needed to introduce all three strands of the braid up front, so I wouldn’t lose readers later. Doing that lets readers know what to expect and gives you license to play with the structure and timeline because you’ve prepared them for it. I spent a lot of time working and re-working how I’d handle introducing all three stories up front since there were so many things to squeeze in.

How do you get all those into the beginning of the book?

A page of Skloot's notes from her first phone call with Deborah Lacks. (For more notes and Skloot's explanations, see "A glimpse behind the scenes" below.) Photo courtesy of Rebecca Skloot.

In a way there are three beginnings to this book because there are three different narratives. The prologue introduces the “me” side of the narrative where I write in first person. Then right after that I have that one little page in Deborah’s voice, to get her firmly in there. I struggled with that. I knew she had to be in the beginning of the book so you’d know she was going to be a main, strong character. I made countless attempts at that using different scenes from late in the story (for a while the book started with the scene of her seeing her mother’s cells for the first time, which is now part of the climax of the book in the third section). But none of that worked because it detracted too much from the real beginning: the moment Henrietta walks into the hospital for the first time in 1951. Eventually I realized readers just need to hear Deborah’s voice enough at the start to know there’s something big coming from this person later on that we’ll come back to.

Back to the larger structure. You start at 1950, and you pop back to 1920, and then essentially you come back to mid-century, end of century, mid-century, end of century, mid-century, end of century. And you progressively spend more time around 2000, and at a certain point it becomes more the story of you and Deborah, once you have the backstory established. How did you plot these time shifts?

I actually mapped it all out with index cards. The one chronological story that goes throughout the book is the story of me and Deborah. That’s totally chronological, never jumps around in time. Having one chronological story helped anchor the structure so I could jump around with the other stories more, because you always came back to that one straightforward narrative.

As I said earlier, I saw the structure of the book as a braid, with three stories that wove and wove and wove. But at a certain point the three strands of the braid became one and the narrative was just a straightforward chronological story from that point. That happens on page 231 with the sentence, “That reporter was me.” That’s the moment that all three of the narratives come together, and then it becomes just one. There’s no jumping back in time after that.

The story of you and Deborah is the one with the most classic narrative tension — there’s a suspense about what will happen.

It’s a road-trip — a journey where everybody gets transformed. I thought a lot about that element of narrative tension and how structure can help build the suspense. I learned quite a bit about that from novels, but even more so from movies. My boyfriend is an actor, writer, and director, and he started saying, “You should be watching movies because this jumping-around structure is one of the most standard movie structures.”

Skloot's color-coded index cards. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Skloot.

So I started watching a lot of movies structured like that and eventually found my way to “Hurricane,” about Hurricane Carter, the boxer. As I was watching it, I just freaked out because after the first few scenes I realized, Oh my God, this is the structure of my book. Three narratives braided together, a journey, etc. So I storyboarded that whole movie frame-by-frame on color-coded index cards (one color per narrative thread). I’d already mapped my own book out using the same three-colored index card scheme, and I’d mapped out a structure, but it wasn’t working. After I mapped out “Hurricane” I spread the cards out on a bed and put my book’s index cards on top of them, lining up the colors, to see how the film was braiding differently than I was. I immediately realized the problem with my structure was that it didn’t move around in time fast enough. That was the big lesson I learned from movies: that to make this kind of structure work, it has to move quickly. You can’t linger too long in any one time period or you lose the momentum of the other two.

How many designs did you try but throw out?

Oh man … From the very first version I wrote to the first version I considered a first draft, I probably went through easily 15 different structures. And that doesn’t count the many times I revised it after that: I’m a heavy re-writer. Once I had a first draft done, I rewrote it completely at least six times before my editor had to pry it out of my hands. I could have kept rewriting it forever. There isn’t a single paragraph from the first draft that made it into the final book without being rewritten. I’d bet money that there isn’t a single sentence from the first draft in the finished book.

This will give comfort to others who are struggling.

Now I want to move to the second topic. You’ve talked before about your decision to put yourself in the book as a presence, a character. What were the arguments in your own head, either as you saw them then or as you see them now, against and for putting yourself in?

Well, for me the argument for years was all against. I refused to be in this book. I think a lot of potentially great stories out there have been damaged and in some cases ruined by a writer not being able to step out of the story and let the story happen. When I teach, I always harp on my students, “Stop inserting yourself in other people’s stories.”

Speed's barber chair, with a small photo of Henrietta Lacks propped against the wall. This and other photos Skloot took at Courtney Speed's hair salon enabled her to describe the scene in which she visits the salon. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Skloot.

There are times when I think writers should be in stories. You may be an actual character in the story, or you might be essential as a bridge between the reader and the story — there are some cases where stories are so foreign to readers that having a first person writer in the middle that fully understands the story can help readers relate to it. I wrote a story for The New York Times Magazine about people who spent tons of money on veterinary care for their goldfish; I put myself in there as a sort of sympathetic bridge toward understanding the people I was writing about. Most readers could relate more to me in that story (someone trying to understand why anyone would do MRIs and CT scans and surgery on a goldfish), than they could to the people I was writing about. In the end, I did understand their motives and saw the ways they were similar to motives we all share when it comes to love and difference — because of that, my presence seemed more likely to help readers connect to those characters than if I’d just told their story without my experience alongside it.

But other than those two situations — the writer as essential character or writer as bridge — I think there is no reason to be in a story.

In this case it offers a substantial gain: By seeing the Lacks family try to deal with you, we’re seeing them try to deal simultaneously with an intrusive world but also with a part of the world that wants to be more sympathetic to them — and a changing view of how human subjects should be used.

Exactly. Pretty early on, when I was struggling with this, I knew this wonderful fiction writer named Albert French who lived right around the corner from me in Pittsburgh. I would talk to him about the story as I was figuring it out. And he kept saying to me over and over again, about the Lacks family, pounding it into my head: “Their resistance to you is part of the story.”

At that point I didn’t know why they were resistant to me. He just kept repeating that. I realized I had to figure out why they were so resistant to me and that doing so would lead me to the real story. Which it did.

The Home House side door. Skloot says, "This is the door where Henrietta used to sit and hang her legs off a stoop while churning butter. It's also where her daughter Elsie fell once and hit her head on the ground below. I wanted to be able to revisit that height, the door, everything about it." Photo courtesy of Rebecca Skloot.

Plus things started happening between me and Deborah that were not your usual writer-subject things, like her slamming me against a wall … like faith healings and something that resembled an exorcism. I would come home and tell my family and my agent and my friends about what was going on and they just kept saying, “This has to be in the book! This is part of the story.”

Even Deborah started harping on me. She would say, “Don’t you make me be in that book by myself. You’re just as much a part of this story as anybody else now.” That’s when I realized I had to be in the book because I was part of the story. It wasn’t that I was inserting myself. Without realizing it, I had actually become a character in their story.

Like it or not.

Yeah. Like it or not. I was one in a long line of people who’d come to them wanting something having to do with those cells, and in some ways, my presence in their lives was one of the most complicated yet: I was there for more than a decade, exposing Deborah to situations and information she never would have been exposed to. She wanted that, and I couldn’t have stopped her once we started, but some of those situations turned out to be dangerous for her. She came very near a stroke at one point because of information we found together about her sister.

A foundation corner of the Home House. This photo helped Skloot document building materials and construction of the house, which was propped up with stones high off the ground. She took many photos of the Home House, from different angles and at different times of year. "These photos helped me create the many descriptions of the house in the book, and also captured the atmosphere of each visit, the rate of change of the house, the turn of seasons," she says. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Skloot.

The story of the HeLa cells is about many things — it’s about science and ethics, race, class, medicine, education. But overall, it’s also about unintended consequences: of doctors, of well-intended science, of journalism. I tell the story of all the other journalists who came along before me and the impact they had on the family. Eventually I realized it would be dishonest to not include the story of my own character, the journalist who came and didn’t leave for ten years. I also felt like I needed to include that story as a form of disclosure, so people could understand the relationship I developed with Deborah.

You’ve set up nicely my next question. This is something I’ve been dying to ask you since I read the book. First of all, you break a million rules of journalism — you’re incredibly embedded in this family, completely enmeshed. The story is sort of out of control. Deborah even tells you on page 233, “You have got no idea what you’re getting yourself into,” and you did not.

Clearly.

So reading it I had a strong, growing sense that we had a Rebecca Skloot, a mature writer, who’s writing a book about a young writer named Rebecca Skloot who was smart and fearless but nevertheless inexperienced and on the brink of major trouble all the time.

Clearly. Yes. Right! (laughter)

Really. You end up in dangerous places; you’re dropped in homes of people who have reason to be hostile to you; at one point you seem in direct and immediate danger of assault when Henrietta’s son Zakariyya is standing over you, yelling at you in rage, and you’re saved — this is my favorite line in the whole book — when Deborah, whom you’ve been taking on reporting trips, for God’s sake, saves your ass by popping up out of nowhere at your shoulder and asking, ”Y’all still reportin’?”

Yeah, I know (laughter). I loved that — definitely one of my favorite lines too.

I think that was the moment that this image crystallized for me: of this young writer, not the one writing the book but the younger writer researching the book in the book, skating ever further out over ever deeper water covered by increasingly thin ice — and miraculously never falling through. Sometimes you could hear the ice crack.

To me this created an added layer of tension, and I suspect that for readers who aren’t thinking of Skloot the character versus Skloot the author, it created a tension, too. Did you mean to be one Rebecca writing about another Rebecca? Or did that sort of happen?

I was conscious of it only in that I was constantly arguing with my younger self.

How do you mean?

Throughout the book I was learning how to be a reporter and how to write. I started fresh from an undergraduate biology degree with no real training in journalism and no clue about how to do any of this. My notes from my first trip to Turner Station were horrible. I sat down ten years later to write that scene (a scene I hadn’t planned to write because I wasn’t planning to be in the book), and I opened the notebook and thought, “That’s all you wrote down? You moron! What were you doing?” My version of notes of the street where I was driving would be: “Dog. Trees. Brick.” It was useless information.

Not trusting that she was yet an expert at documenting surroundings in her notes, Skloot took this photo to document the sky and weather as she drove to Turner Station. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Skloot.

The thing that saved me was that I took compulsive amounts of photographs. I photographed everything — every room that I was in, every person I talked to, every street that I was on, the sky to capture the weather, you name it.

So you were over-reporting visually.

Yes. Also I tape-recorded everything, including just driving around in the car yelling at myself — the 20-something me is in a car trying to convince myself to get out in the most dangerous part of East Baltimore and start knocking on the doors of strangers who I know aren’t going to be happy to see me … I’m driving around yelling into my tape recorder because I’m afraid. “Just get out of the car!”

In case she later decided to mention that there were wildflowers growing outside the abandoned building that might become the Henrietta Lacks Museum, Skloot photographed wildflowers growing nearby. She planned to have a botanist identify the species of flower if she described them. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Skloot.

But I would also hold up my tape recorder and drive and just babble into it: I’m driving down the street, and there are all these kids running around in the street and they’re wearing these clothes and they look like this and they’re waving at me and their moms are hanging laundry in front of houses that look like this … So when I went back and transcribed all my tapes, everything was there, including my internal issues, and that, combined with the photographs, let me go back and rewrite those scenes. But I also re-reported many of them. I would go back to the people who were there at the time and interview them about scenes that I had actually witnessed myself, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Many times they’d be like, “Weren’t you there? Why are you asking me these questions?” And I’d think, “No, that wasn’t me; that was ten-years-ago me; that’s actually a totally different me.”

Writing the first-person stuff was hard, partly because I was resistant but also because it involved this weird battle with my younger, inexperienced self. Listening to these tapes later, it really registered, “Wow, you were doing something sort of crazy right there.”

Right. That’s the feeling I got repeatedly: “Oh my God, she just invited Deborah to do the reporting with her!” I was thinking as I read, “This cannot end well.”

But it did.

People often ask if I wish that this book had taken less time. I wouldn’t trade those ten years. If I had written this book faster, it just wouldn’t have worked. I needed all that time to really understand the story and how it all fit together.

Your enmeshment within the family kind of goes against a journalistic idea about involvement and distance from subjects and so on. Do you think it’s important to keep a certain distance, and if so, how do you reconcile that with how close you came to be with the Lacks family?

I think that it’s important to maintain distance in terms of autonomy of the story. So no matter how close and enmeshed I got with the Lacks family, there was never any question that I was a reporter. Deborah would call me “her reporter,” and I think that in part was because I was constantly reminding her that’s what I was. A reporter. I always had my notepad out and my tape recorder on because I felt like it was essential to have that constant reminder there: everything we talked about was going on the record. Deborah had no problem with that. When she had a point to make that she felt strongly about, she’d grab my tape recorder out of my hand and yell into the microphone, then she’d have me play it back for her so she could make sure it got recorded. There was never any question about our relationship being reporter and subject, and that I wasn’t just there to do an as-told-to story of the Lacks family’s life. We talked a lot about the other people I interviewed and research I did because I felt it was important to always be clear that I was telling all sides of this story, not just theirs. Which is what Deborah wanted anyway, so that was never an issue.

That said, I do feel like you have to open yourself up to the emotions of the story and be vulnerable as well. In that way, I’m not a fan of distance. With the Lacks family and everybody else, I have always been a very open writer. I feel like, I’m asking you endless questions and expecting you to answer them no matter how personal; it’s only fair that you be able to do the same to me. I think it helps build trust.

You go in guarded against Deborah and she’s gonna throw you out.

Oh yeah, to win Deborah’s trust, you’d have been that open, and then some. She spent so much of her life being deceived, having information withheld from her, she couldn’t trust someone if she didn’t feel like she knew them.

A glimpse behind the scenes:

*

David Dobbs

Guest Contributor David Dobbs is an author and journalist who writes about science and culture for The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Wired, National Geographic,  and other magazines. His e-book My Mother’s Lover, published by The Atavist, was a #1 Kindle-Single bestseller. He is the author of three other books and writes the Wired blog Neuron Culture. Several of his magazine stories have been included in leading anthologies, including Best American Science Writing 2010 and Best American Sports Writing 2011. Follow David on Twitter @David_Dobbs.

Lauren Gravitz

For years, journalist Lauren Gravitz had planned to write an in-depth feature on Rockefeller University physician-scientist Ralph Steinman, highlighting the dendritic cells that had been his life’s work and his efforts to use those cells to treat his own cancer. Formerly a science writer at Rockefeller, Gravitz had spoken often with Steinman and knew his work well. She checked in with him regularly after she left the university, each time asking whether he might be ready to share his story, but every time he demurred. Last month, when it was announced that Steinman had died just three days before being awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, Gravitz was heartbroken. She also knew that the story she had nurtured in her mind was no longer hers alone. Soon, though, she saw that most news outlets had overlooked the part of the story she cared about most – the collision of Steinman’s pioneering work with his disease. [A Fight for Life that United a Field appeared in Nature on October 11, 2011.]

Here, Gravitz tells the story behind the story:

How did this story come about?

This was a story that had actually been knocking around in my mind for a while. I worked at Rockefeller for a couple of years, and I was there at the time when Ralph was diagnosed with cancer, in 2007. I had covered his lab for a couple of years and was really familiar with his work, and familiar with the fact that he had been putting a lot of attention into trying to use dendritic cells for therapies for HIV and cancer.

It was one of those stories that was so poignant, in the sense that it’s painful anytime a researcher studies a disease and then ends up being diagnosed with the disease that he studies. So when I heard that he was working with other immunologists to develop a therapy for the disease, I told him that I’d like to write about it and to highlight the work that he had done on dendritic cells.

I left Rockefeller in 2008, and told him again that I would be interested in it. He said, “Yes, yes, maybe sometime.” That was his response every time I would check in with him over the next couple of years. You could tell that he was putting a lot of pressure on himself to get as much done as he could in the time he had left, and a pesky reporter hanging around was not part of that plan. Anyway, he didn’t become available, and I also was not particularly pushy about asking regularly.

And then what?

On October 3, as soon as I woke up, I went to the Nobel website to see who they’d announced as the winner. I do this every October on the day that the physiology or medicine prizes are announced. When I was at Rockefeller, every year people were anticipating that Ralph might receive it — he was one of the people believed to be on the shortlist. So every year since my time there I’ve been pretty faithful about checking. And not even a week prior to the announcement this year, I had emailed Dr. Steinman, checking in, and hadn’t heard back. So when I saw his name, I was just elated and wrote to the folks at Rockefeller to say so. Within about 10 minutes, I received a reply from one of my former bosses, saying, “Yes, but the news is very bittersweet — we just got word that he passed away three days ago.”

I went from feeling totally elated to feeling pretty devastated within a couple of minutes, as I’m sure anyone who knew him did. At that point I stopped thinking about the story I’d wanted to write. I felt like this story that had been mine — the sense of possession every reporter feels when they have a bead on something — that story was suddenly out there for everyone who wanted it to grab and run with it. I had been envisioning it as a feature, something that allowed a pretty deep exploration of the person and the people around him, his science, and the narrative of the developing disease.

Then all of the sudden, the story changed. Now it was being driven by the awarding of the prize and Ralph’s dying just a few days before receiving it. So I wasn’t sure that a feature of that sort would work anymore because people had leapt on it, to some degree — although they seemed to leap on the much more poignant piece of the award, as opposed to everything that preceded it. Some outlets did give it a little bit more space. But the more I read, the more I realized that nobody had paid much attention to the research element, which was something I cared about a lot – the fact that he used the cells he’d discovered to treat himself. So I kind of bemoaned the fact that my story disappeared.

What made you pursue it after all?

I was describing the situation to a few science writer friends, and telling them how sad I was that this feature I’d been imagining, this story with such a touching narrative, was now as good as dead. One of these friends was Alex Witze, who used to be an editor at Nature, and she urged me to pitch it to them anyway. And I did, I guess with the hope that I could bring a fresh perspective to it and add something to the story that wasn’t already being talked about ad nauseam.

So I wrote up a pitch letter and sent it at 9 p.m. Pacific time that night. I woke up to a reply from the news editor at Nature saying that they were interested, with a pretty specific set of elements that they’d like me to include [editors’ note: see supplemental material below]. One of the questions that the Nature editor was particularly concerned with was that Ralph appeared to have been involved in multiple clinical trials, and you really can’t be involved in more than one at a time, according to the FDA. So he wanted to know the specifics of how that worked — how each of the different therapies fit together and whether it was all above-board, which it very much was, as it turns out. They were all compassionate-use protocols and single-person clinical trials.

What were your first steps in developing the story?

My first step was to just haul ass. I called the PIO at Rockefeller to make sure that people would in fact be willing to speak to yet another reporter, and would be available on short notice, because we were looking at a very short turnaround — it was about two and a half days — for a pretty in-depth science story. I got the OK from him; he said that everybody involved was actually very open to talking to reporters. So I spoke with three or four people who were at Rockefeller when I was there, three of whom are still there. Each of them had suggestions for people to talk to, and I spent the next two days pretty much on the phone, finding out as much as I could about the different therapies that he had tried. I spoke with 12 people over the course of about two days. I think what was most challenging, more than anything else, was simply the idea of talking to that many people and trying to coordinate it in a way that made sure that I got all the information that I needed. But it ended up being remarkably easy. They were all incredibly open to talking, and they were all very, very willing to talk soon. As strange as it sounds, it may have been one of the smoothest interview-scheduling experiences I’ve ever had, because everyone was so interested in talking to me about him — he really had that effect on people.

That’s a lot of interviews in a very short period of time. How much time did you spend on each?

It varied. I would say the shortest was maybe 10 minutes. There were a couple that were that length, including one that was really, really difficult because it was someone who had worked with Ralph very, very closely and who at this point and had at this point been talking to reporters and family and trustees of the university and colleagues and collaborators for 24 hours. By the time I spoke with him, he was so wrecked and emotionally exhausted that it sounded like he was on the verge of tears the whole time. It was one of those interviews that made me feel like just a terrible person for talking to someone during his time of grief. And he was so exhausted that most of what he was telling me wasn’t particularly useful — he either didn’t quite understand what I was asking or didn’t give an on-point answer. By the time he spoke with me, he just was done. It was a very uncomfortable interview, and I think that one lasted maybe 8 minutes, at which point I said, “Thank you very much.” But some of my other interviews went on for about 45 minutes.

Steinman underwent a very complicated course of treatment over several years. How did you piece together the chronology?

It did get pretty complicated, but luckily there were a few people who were involved pretty much from the get-go and who were able to give me the chronology pretty early on in my reporting. So I was able to start with a timeline that I understood and then go back to that timeline with every subsequent person I spoke with. That helped a lot.

You appear in the first person in this story. How did you navigate that?

That was probably the most challenging thing for me. It was something that my editor explicitly asked for in the assignment letter, as he felt it was important to state fairly high up that I had worked at Rockefeller and had known Ralph to some degree. Writing about myself is something I usually shy away from — I usually run in the opposite direction. I don’t like to insert myself in a story, and yet in this one, it was absolutely necessary. I had to do it — you can’t write about someone whose work you used to write about, as an employee of his institution, without mentioning that in fact you used to work at that institution. So it made perfect sense that my editor asked that of me. But it was difficult to put myself into a story in which the grief was really someone else’s. The emotion really belonged to the people I was speaking with, not to me. So to throw myself and my perspective into a story that was so not about me was really difficult.

How did you figure out how to bring yourself in?

It was hard to figure out how to do that, but it fell into place a bit when it became a narrative. In relating it in chronological order, I began to fit naturally into it. I think — I hope — at least what I was able to bring to it was the perspective of someone who thinks, Wait, he’s doing what? He’s using his own cells? By inserting myself into the story in that role, it acted as a device to ask some of the questions that other people were likely thinking: Is this all above-board? Is he just injecting himself in a back room somewhere?

What was the most challenging aspect of reporting and writing this story?

Really it boils down to the fact that I knew him. I didn’t know him really well, by any means, but I covered his lab for about two and a half years, and every time a paper came out of the Steinman lab, I wrote about it, and we spoke at length about different aspects of his research. Trying to keep a journalistic distance was really difficult for me — and I’m actually really not convinced that I did that. I think that the fact that I appear in first person in the story is important, because I don’t think I could claim that I was journalistically distant enough to have an outside perspective. Also, of course, it was an emotional subject. It was the culmination of his life’s work that he never got to see. And that journalistic distance that we all strive for and talk about…at some point those walls broke down for me. Occasionally when I was interviewing, I found myself welling up at other people’s pain, but it was still emotion that bled through.

Why does that bother you?

I think that emotions can make for very good writing; and I think they can get in the way of very good journalism. They can cloud judgment and lead to stories that aren’t as penetrating. Emotion can make for great, lyrical writing, but it can get in the way of critical thinking.

Were there any important lessons that you learned, in writing this story?

This is a very personal lesson, but I’ve been doing a lot of stories that I sometimes refer to as “churn” — they were interesting and I liked them, but I wasn’t particularly invested in them. They were a lot of news stories, or even some features that were very information-dense. Stories like that are great, in that I learn an awful lot while I’m doing them, but because I didn’t care deeply about the subject the writing itself can be very hard. With this story, what I found was that the writing was remarkably easy, because I was so invested in what I was writing about.

The other thing I’d want to relate is how difficult it is to write something like this without starting to feel an inappropriate closeness to the subject. And I think that was harder still because everyone I spoke to, to a person, had nothing but wonderful things to say about him. He was someone who was not only an amazing scientist, but a good, good person who put his family and his friends on the same level as his science — which you don’t always see in a Nobel award-winner.

A glimpse behind the scenes:

• Pitch letter
• Edited draft